


Prius Dementat

by embyrinitalics



Series: Whumptober Collections [2]
Category: Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Barbarian!Link, Blind!Link, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, Faronian!Link, Huntsman!Link, Mad Scientist!Zelda, Poe!Link, Sacrificial Virgin!Zelda, Whump, Whumptober 2020, dragon!link, triggers listed in chapters, twili!link, zelink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 32
Words: 57,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27405343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embyrinitalics/pseuds/embyrinitalics
Summary: "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." [Whumptober 2020][Now with bonus!chapter concluding the Paranoia/Infection story arc]
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Series: Whumptober Collections [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001739
Comments: 154
Kudos: 107
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	1. Waking Up Restrained

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on ffn & tumblr October 2020.

_Prompt No. 1  
Word count: ~1870  
Universe: Twilight Princess, sequel to "No. 21 — Laced Drink" (2019/Ira Deorum)  
_ _Pairings: Zelink_  
_Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Brainwashing, memory loss, fever, restraints_

**Waking Up Restrained**

It was _hot_.

Sweat dripped down the back of his neck, down his front. The air was thick like chu jelly and his eyelids felt weighted. He couldn't lift his hands to cover his brow, to blot out the light making his head pound.

They were tied to the bed.

He forced his eyes open, pulse spiking, and slurped a gelatinous breath. He thrashed, pulled hard against shackles on his wrists, around his neck, and heard water and ceramic hit the floor. He sat up and clambered back blindly against the headboard, gasping and trembling with adrenaline as the room blurred—and then he felt cold hands on his jaw, heard a familiar voice trying to soothe him, and swallowed.

"You're all right, Link. You're safe."

He sagged into her touch, panting, and tried to open his eyes again. He caught a glimmer of tired eyes, of her exhausted expression, before he had to shut them. The room wouldn't stop spinning.

"Zelda," he murmured, propriety forgotten, wishing her hands were everywhere. The air was still too thick, and so was his voice. "What's going on?"

"Try to relax," she said, brushing his matted bangs from his forehead. "You haven't been yourself."

He hadn't a clue what that was supposed to mean. Or why it felt like he was burning alive. He tried to breathe and choked on sludge.

"It's hot," he rasped, and she flickered out of reach.

For a moment he thought she had left him to burn. But then he heard her gather something wet off the floor, and soon after a cool washcloth dabbed at his forehead, at his throat, at the sides of his neck. It cleared his head a little. He could hear the frown on her voice.

"It's the fever. I don't know how long it will be before it breaks," she said, and the slight tremor in her throat told him it had already been a while.

That was unlike her. She was usually so calm and collected, even when everyone around her fidgeted. He couldn't help but wonder what had her so off balance. And why was she the one at his bedside, anyway? Wasn't it a bit beneath the queen to tend to a soldier on his sickbed?

She asked, "How much do you remember?"

He thought back, wading through a hazy murk of memories, some of them distinctly monochromatic in his head. It must have been the fever.

"I was on assignment in the desert," he panted, and sighed in relief when she pressed the cloth beneath his collarbone.

There was shuffling. Someone closed the drapes. Picked up the pieces of the bowl he had unintentionally sent crashing to the floor. He heard someone place a new one nearby and fill it. The queen took the cloth away to refresh it, and then wrung it out and set it back to his face.

"What else?"

"Nothing," he whispered. "I came home."

The door closed. He tried opening his eyes again. The room was darker with the windows covered, not quite so dizzying even if the room did still swerve a bit. They were alone again. There was a glass of water on the nightstand. He reached for it, his hand coming up dismally short, and he blinked at the chain. There was blood dried down the length of his forearm.

Zelda reached for the glass in his stead, frowning, and sidled onto the mattress, cradling his neck and guiding the rim to his lips. He downed it and still felt thirsty. She was refilling the glass from the pitcher before he could ask for it.

"What happened?" he asked, after she had helped him drink the rest.

She rubbed at her hands like they hurt her, and then reached for the washcloth and wrung it out again. He watched her, waiting for an answer, as she pressed the cool relief against his neck. He knew that silence, that calculated restraint that she used so often navigating diplomatic hurdles. When she had a secret, or there were feelings to spare, or worse. He hated it.

"How long do you think you've been home?"

"Two weeks, maybe," he slurred, watching her blur and tilt.

She frowned, but it seemed more like a reflex than a display of her displeasure with his answer. She dipped the cloth again, wrung it out. Her hands shook.

Finally, she said, "You've been home four months."

Light pulsed behind his eyes, all red and thick, overlaying a sudden blur of images in his mind like a film. Rotations and faces and duty rosters, meals and reports and routine, and sometimes, floating a little brighter than the others, smiles from his queen. But it was like watching his life play out of someone else's eyes.

He whispered, flinching, "That's impossible."

But the light got brighter, redder, thicker, painting the influx of memories like blood. And then there _was_ blood—on the wall, on the doorknob, on a guard's throat or his middle or the back of his head, on Link's teeth as they shunted back into his gums. People who had seen too much, who had become too suspicious. Who had begun to guess.

And no one would accuse the Hero of Twilight of assaulting men who were so obviously mauled by a beast.

He couldn't breathe. He wanted to scream, wanted to claw the images out of his mind, wanted to drop his head into his hands and weep, but they wouldn't reach. The chains kept his hands uselessly near his ribs. And the light only got redder.

"Oh gods," he choked. "What have I done?"

He could still taste their blood on his teeth. Men he had trained and served with and fought beside. It made him gag, all metallic and syrupy where it had hit the back of his throat. Tears fell from his eyes, part shame and part mourning and part shock. But he couldn't even wipe them away. The chains around his wrists were too short.

"Link," she said, her cool hand twisting his face sideways so he had to look at her anchoring him in the present. Her eyes weren't the serene, intelligent blue they usually were. They were too turbulent and harried, like she hadn't slept in days. "I need you to listen. I won't have you for long. I need you to remember. You said the Gerudo gave you a potion."

Cold pain shunted through his skull like an ice pick driven through his left eye. He pulled at the restrains, a cry catching in his throat, his hands making claws as he reached to press against his aching head. He saw them. He saw white lips, a sandstone room, heard a soft voice whispering, whispering, whispering…

"I know it hurts, but I need you to remember. Anything at all. What color was the potion? What did it smell like? Can you remember the taste?"

The pain grew in his head like a tumor, and then slithered down his throat, grabbing frigidly at muscles and bone. His chest cramped and his lungs felt crushed. It was like watching a memory through a cloud, noxious and rancid. He wanted to look away. He saw a furl of red hair, the soft silk of a veil, heard a soft voice whispering, whispering, whispering…

"Purple," he gasped, throat constricting as he tried to draw up the rest. "It smelled… it was like drinking a poe's soul. It had the same smell. It tasted like death."

Her brow furrowed, and then she rushed away, digging through stacks at the far side of the room, and came back in a hurry with a tome in her arms. She climbed onto the mattress and spread the book open between them, scouring with her hands and tumbling through pages.

"That's good. What else?"

"It turned everything—I don't know. Everything turned hazy and thick. It was like being underwater for too long. Like I couldn't breathe—" he rocked against the ache, pulled against the chains, forced the rest out like a tortured confession. "Like my tongue was swollen in my mouth."

The pain lurched down his spine and settle between the vertebrae, growing until he thought they might snap, and he screamed through his teeth. She abandoned her research and moved to take his face in her hands, knowing she was close to losing him. He quaked, gasped, panted, burning alive and frosting over at once, and in his delirium he looked at her. Because there was nothing as good or as beautiful in the world as she was, and he was miserable enough to reach for comfort wherever he could find it, no matter how improper.

And for once, she looked lost. What he wouldn't have given to be able to guide her.

"What did they tell you?" she asked.

_Kill kill kill kill…_

He dropped his head into her hands, gasping, sobbing, trying not to listen. But it was getting louder all the time. Little instructions, seeds of ideas: weaken the country from the inside out, damage the walls in imperceptible places, hurt them in ways they won't see coming.

_Kill kill kill kill…_

"You have to remember…"

"I _can't_ …"

_Kill kill kill kill…_

Her hands threaded in his hair, across his scalp, and when he dropped his face it met her neck. Her fingers stroked his nape, soothing him and making his stomach twist at once. He panted against her throat, wondering at the soft, ambrosial taste on his lips. Her skin was cool like porcelain. He wanted to tip his face up against the restraints, sip the flavor of her chin, of her mouth.

_Kill the queen._

He went still in her arms, the directive so unbreakable and sure that it numbed the pain. It was like waking from a dream.

His transformation was quick, but she was quicker.

He thrashed against his chains in a fury, fur and claws and teeth claiming him as he lurched to tear out her throat. She was already standing at the foot of his bed, watching with shallow, glassy eyes. This was hardly the first time he'd taken a snap at her. It wouldn't be the last before this was over.

He growled and frothed, his wolfshape turned senseless by the Gerudo's tampering. His body had twisted itself around while he shifted, his hind feet clawing at the headboard as he strained against the irons around his neck and forelimbs, digging so hard into them as he pulled that they drew blood.

She couldn't help but wonder how much of him had been real over the last four months. How many of his smiles and soft compliments had been part of the act, part of the subterfuge. How much of it had been a means to get close enough to kill her, and how much of it had been the real Link shining through.

She didn't want to set herself up for disappointment by hoping. The odds of anything he had done not being completely colored by the brainwashing was slim at best. And yet, she hoped.

And she hoped she could find a way to reverse what they had done without killing him first.


	2. In the Hands of the Enemy

_Prompt No. 2_ _  
_ _Word count: ~940  
Universe: Ocarina of Time, prequel to "No. 5 — Rescue"  
_ _Pairings: None  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Horror, restrained by hands, eaten alive, Dead Hand_

**In the Hands of the Enemy**

He couldn't remember with any clarity now where the fight had gone wrong. It might have been the skull that disintegrated and rolled under his boot, throwing his balance, or the way Navi's light in that impossibly dark place cast more shadows than he knew what to do with, or when one of those things grabbed the wrist of his sword hand and bent it until he expected it to snap. And once he was swordless, once the fairylight was snuffed out and the dark reclaimed the crypt, he was quickly subdued. In that grisly place, carpeted and walled with skulls and bones, he expected death would follow soon afterwards.

But he was still alive, or something like it. The catacomb had become his prison.

A hand was clapped tight over his mouth, so tight one of the bony, slick fingers was quashing his lips apart and pressing against his teeth, seeping rot into his mouth. Another hand was flattened on his forehead, twisted and inverted on its disjointed arm, nails dug into his scalp to keep him still, drilled deep enough that an easy twist or curl of knuckle would force him into submission if he wriggled.

There was a hand around his throat, every gnarl and rib of its fingers chafing his gullet when he swallowed. There were hands clasped around his biceps, on his forearms, around his wrists, contorting his arms into useless corkscrews and pulling him deeper, deeper into a bed of splintering bone. Gaunt thumbs hooked ruthlessly into his hips, and claws pierced the flesh under his thighs and down to his shinbones and through the softest part of his ankles.

He couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't taste or smell anything besides dust and rot. But he felt too much, and heard everything. And he had been like that for days.

The hollow snap and crackle of bones rolling over each other echoed cavernously in the dark, making the little hairs on his neck stand erect. It was the creature emerging from where it slept—beneath the ground, or within the rotten walls—signaling the start of a ritual he was becoming horrifyingly accustomed to. It scented the air for him, tasting his liveliness in that place that stank of death, and then dragged its muculent body over femurs and ribs and bits of spine, fracturing and popping beneath its hulking weight.

He couldn't see it lurching closer, couldn't see it hang its thick, stretched neck over him and its unhinged jaw opening too wide. But he could feel it. He could feel its hot, damp breath washing over his clammy skin, could feel it pawing his at bare chest with the stumps at the end of its arms where hands should have been.

His breath came quicker, chest cramping as he anticipated the rest.

Drool pooled at his breastbone. And then the feeding apparatus pierced him through, the hands around his throat and over his mouth tightening to smother his scream.

It was cold and glutinous, a cross between a sewing needle and a tongue. The creature groaned to itself as it slithered closer, hungry and greedy, and plunged the needle deeper. Bile rose in his throat and tears pricked at his eyes as the hands pulled on him in unison, dragging him down so he crunched against brittle bones, preparing to feed.

It drank, and no amount of strangling could stop the sound it pulled out of him, long and anguished. His body lurched, half from the sensation surging through him from end to end and half from the violence of the method, the barbed end of the tube jerking up against his chest cavity with every slurp, lifting him so hard against the hands holding him down he was sure it would rip him open. It was so cold every muscle in his body convulsed, so hot every nerve blistered, so dark and unending and hopeless that tears streamed down his face. There was no begging, no surrender, no giving it what it wanted. There was no death, no escape, no end. It just drank, and drank, and drank, and when he was dry it would wait a few hours, burrow itself back into the darkness until he was ready for it again, and come crawling out to drain him.

The needle drove deeper, ravenous for every last drop, bending and pushing until he thought it was up in his throat, and the creature gulped faster. He choked on it, thrashed uselessly, tried to count the seconds until it would be finished with him. But every session seemed longer than the last, his body building up some sort of tolerance to the process instead of withering. Adapting to the routine of being eaten alive.

It was his mind that was breaking. His only coherent thought anymore was that death couldn't come quick enough.

And suddenly there was light, a blaze so horrific and white that the creature shrieked and withdrew. His vision pulsed white and red as he gasped a haggard breath, as the hands on his throat and his mouth recoiled and his arms and legs were freed. Then there was heat, a great dome of fire erupting over his head and all around him, and then a shadow, encircling him protectively as the creature burned and screamed and casting them in a cyclone of green wind.

He caught impressions of moonlight, of red eyes, of a voice calling his name and a trembling ball of fairylight, before he sagged in the arms around him and slipped into something dark and dreamless.


	3. Manhandled

_Prompt No. 3  
_ _Word count: ~2140  
Universe: Ocarina of Time / Majora's Mask  
_ _Pairings: Slight Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Age Dysphoria_

**Manhandled**

Time travel was sort of like dying backwards.

For a moment he was out of time altogether—were there moments, then?—trapped in a vacuum with no beginning and no end in some bland nonexistence, a void humming with unfulfilled potential. And then a river would catch him, drag him upstream or down, and he would pull a haggard gasp as he was squeezed back into the timestream. As he was reborn. Sometimes older, sometimes younger. Lungs expanding and eyes refocusing like he was coming back to life again. All the molecules in his body resettling, sensing their own displacement.

But this time was different. He felt smaller. Like his body had shrunk too far. He kept stretching his hands, reaching with tiny fingers until the knuckles popped and rolling his shoulder like he could realign a few more inches back into in his spine. He felt like he was drowning in the Hylian Shield on his back, too heavy and clunky to be of any use. He dumped it in an alley between the temple and the Happy Mask Shop. Some kids were playing with it the next day, pretending at being soldiers.

Link felt strangely tired as he approached the castle gates. Like it took ten times the energy to get anywhere on such short legs. He drew up to the guard standing in front of the gatehouse, chafing at the way he had to crane his neck to meet his eyes.

"I have an urgent message for the princess," he panted, frowning and swallowing dust. His voice was an octave too high.

"Princess Zelda, eh?" the guard droned, arching a skeptical brow. "You probably heard about her in town and decided you had to meet her."

He stifled a sigh. Of course. In their eyes he was just a child.

"No," he said, perhaps too firmly. The guard's expression was darkening. Adamance was easily confused with insolence in children. "I told you. I'm here to deliver a message."

He reached into his pocket to produce proof: the Ocarina of Time, emblazoned with the Royal Family's seal. But it wasn't there. His fingers met the small, imperfect clay figurine he had gotten from Saria, grainy and flawed to the touch instead of polished and pristine. He swallowed thickly. Of course not. He had given it to her.

"Well, you're in luck. If you leave your message with me, I'll be sure to pass it on to her."

He squared his shoulders. "I have to speak with her directly. The kingdom is in jeopardy and—"

But the guard had had enough. He sneered at him, hefting him away from the gate by the elbow. Link tried to plant his feet, shift his weight, make himself immovable, but he was so light and compact that he lifted off his toes at the slightest pull. The guard tossed him the last few feet. His arms were too short and soft, his legs stubby and clumsy. He landed on his face in the dirt.

"Go home! Get out of here! The Princess would never grant an audience to the likes of you!"

He heaved himself to his feet, ignoring the metallic taste where his teeth had met the inside of his lip. He didn't have time to waste trying to prove himself to a bored, frustrated gatekeeper. He didn't know why he bothered trying to get in the front door in the first place.

He scaled the ivy near the mouth of the ravine, snuck through the castle gardens, and met the Princess of Destiny. He sat on the courtyard steps with her and recounted a future that would never come to pass. He ensured that the Gerudo King of Thieves was exposed for the traitor he was.

And his task was complete. He didn't gather three Spiritual Stones. He didn't open the Door of Time, or claim the Blade of Evil's Bane. The Triforce lay whole and untouched in the Sacred Realm, where it belonged.

 _Now you can finally rest_ , she had said. _Be the way you are supposed to be._

He wanted to tell her then what he hadn't told her the first time: that he didn't know how to rest anymore. That he wasn't sure this _was_ the way he was supposed to be (and now that he was here, he was even more skeptical). But he tried his best to obey, to be grateful.

It was just difficult.

Doorknobs were too high. He could barely see wares over countertops. He was pushed and shoved by the crush in Castletown, too small to be noticed and his voice too high to garner attention, blending in with the murmur of the crowd instead of humming beneath it. And when he had had a purpose, when reverting to this form was a means to an end, a disguise, a tool, it hadn't bothered him. But now he was purposeless, and weakened, and _stuck like this_. It made something hot bubble in his throat. Something that tasted suspiciously like fury.

He couldn't go back to the forest—even if the Kokiri would have accepted him without Navi and after what had happened with the Great Deku Tree, it wasn't where he wanted to be. (He went back once to see Saria. She had smiled weakly at him, said he seemed different. He didn't go back again.)

He spent half a year working at the ranch. (His nickname fizzled out after the first time Malon asked him where his fairy went.) But even that menial work bred frustration. The pitchforks were too long, the hay bales too heavy, the wheelbarrow too unwieldy. He couldn't mount a horse without climbing up on the fence posts.

Finally, he tried to join the army. They laughed at him when he went to enlist. But he insisted.

He got himself smacked around, and he earned a black eye and skinned knees for his efforts.

They told him, "Come back when you're a man."

He wandered back through the city streets until he found himself, grudgingly, inevitably, in front of the castle gates. The last place left where there was someone who knew what he had done and really, truly believed him. They didn't stop him at the gatehouse. A letter from the princess saw to that, as it had at other gates in other lifetimes.

That a swish of her pen could pry open the gates of time, let him jump back through to a shape that suited him better.

They set out tea and sandwiches for the princess and her guest. Not quite an audience. Not quite a playdate.

Link spent the whole of it pacing beside their table, ranting and pulling his hair out, telling her about the forest and the ranch and the enlistment office, and every other disappointment between. He was half way into his tirade when he looked over, meeting wide blue eyes, and saw the confusion in them. Saw that, for all her wisdom, all her faith, all her gifts, he was still yelling at a child. He plopped down in his chair mid-sentence and ate a sandwich.

"I'm so sorry," she finally said, staring, still a bit shaken, at her brimming teacup.

He swallowed a lump of crust. It scratched all the way down. "It wasn't your fault."

She looked like she wasn't sure he believed that. He wasn't sure either.

The next time he came to see her, Epona in tow, she was clutching the ocarina in her hands.

"You are already leaving this land of Hyrule," she said, "aren't you?"

He didn't bother trying to explain himself. He had said plenty on that front already.

She didn't try to stop him. She gave him the ocarina, and a song he already knew, and then watched him leave without looking back.

He found a world on the other side of that one. He became even more entangled with time than he was before: commanding it, traveling through it, letting himself be devoured by it. He knew three days like he knew his own mind, the rhythms of it, the heartbeat, and the longer he lingered there, the more he found that his shape didn't matter.

He had all sorts of shapes. He was a Deku child (which was ostensibly worse than being a Hylian child), a Goron hero, a Zora celebrity, a god. And it changed the way people saw him. He wore one mask one moment, and then another. He could be a stranger, a friend, a helper, a lover. They would thank him with tears in their eyes one day, and then forget he ever existed the next.

It was a condensed, dizzying reflection of what it had been like reintegrating into his own time. Almost like the goddesses were trying to tell him something.

_...A sword? My apologies, sir. It was wrong of me to treat you like a child._

_You've become an adult now, Romani… I see it in you. I'm acknowledging it._

_I wonder… if you do the right thing… Does it really make… everybody… happy?_

By the dawn of the fourth day, he felt even more lost than before.

He wandered for five years looking for answers. And then he found himself, grudgingly, inevitably, in front of the castle gates. The last place left where there was someone who knew what he had done and really, truly believed him. He really should have known.

He produced Zelda's letter at the gatehouse. It was a little worse for wear—stained, dog-eared, wrinkled and mottled by time and storms and moon-ash and who knew what else. Always with him, tucked away as neatly as he could keep it.

To say she was surprised to see him was something of an understatement. He was escorted to the library, where she was in transit between the towering shelves and a writing desk with a stack of books in her arms, and when she saw him they all tumbled out of her grasp to the floor.

The servants set out a generous spread of tea, pastries, and sandwiches. It was distinctly reminiscent of their last audience-slash-playdate. They sat in awkward silence at opposite ends of the table, the wall clock ticking away (and he found himself more attuned to the sounds clocks made now, like he could feel the seconds drumming out of them, catch them, reel them back if he wanted to. Because he could). He nibbled on a pastry speckled with berries and she stirred her tea, too slowly, too circuitously.

She blurted, finally, "Would you like to go for a walk?"

He smiled at her. "Yeah."

So they walked the grounds, and none of the guards tried to throw him out. She had changed in the years he was away: not quite the princess he remembered, not quite the child she was. She was willowy and soft, not as boisterous as before. She glided now more than she trotted, smiled placidly more than she laughed. He wondered how he must have seemed to her.

They found a quiet spot in a corner garden, nestled away from the sentries, and he splayed out in the grass on his back. She settled next to the hedgerow, tucking the edge of her skirt beneath the tips of her shoes. He closed his eyes and let the sun warm him up. The sun felt better in Hyrule. Or maybe it felt better for being close to her.

"I thought a lot about what you said," she told him, and he opened an eye to squint at her. "I think I understand why you left."

"I shouldn't have burdened you with that," he murmured, thinking back to those wide blue eyes that had stared at him over his tea sandwich. "It wasn't your fault. I'm sorry I left things the way I did."

"No, I'm glad you told me. It would have been worse not knowing."

The wind rustled the garden, and a strain of silence fell in its wake. He wasn't sure what he should say. But she spoke before he felt the need to.

"Are you old enough to join the army now?" she asked.

"I don't know," he answered truthfully. He'd lost track of his age somewhere between spans of seven years and three days. "I'm not even sure that's where I want to be anymore, anyway. It's what I'm good at. But I think I applied for the wrong reasons. Because I was tired of being treated like a child." He laughed a little at himself. "Because I was tired of being manhandled."

She smirked gently. "Then what will you do now?"

He furrowed his brow, thinking, but the answer came surprisingly easily.

"I'll do whatever I have to do to stay close to you," he said, and her small, answering smile made her eyes glitter.


	4. Caged

_Prompt No. 4  
_ _Word count: ~3110  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; prequel to "No. 7 — Support"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Human trafficking/slavery, stab wounds, outnumbered_

**Caged**

Cages on cages were stacked in the market square, lined in neat rows for easy browsing as the early morning bustle began. Sunlight carved through the mist, casting stripes and silhouettes on the ground like another, larger cage as it struck the display. All the better to catch the eye. The livestock within were gagged and hobbled to keep them looking well-behaved, but the way they shivered and their breath misted in the chill made them look rather pitiful. But human livestock rarely looked anything other than pitiful.

Slavetrade was a nasty business, and it was alive and well in Tabantha.

Link kept his gaze solidly ahead as he went, preferring not to ogle the way others did. Some looked to buy, others looked merely for the spectacle. But he had no intention of purchasing, and he had seen enough of that sort of suffering for it to lack amusement.

He frowned at the callous tenor of his own thoughts and made himself glance over as he passed by.

It was a typical assortment: scrawny orphans, old men who had gambled away their livelihoods, women speckled with scars from previous owners, and an array of exotic faces, from nabbed Goron children to elegant, shackled Zoras.

His gaze snagged on a pair of glistening green eyes surrounded by strands of golden hair like rough cloth caught on a briar, and he frowned as he snatched it back and put it on the road ahead of him. A Hylian girl. With a face as pretty as that, she was certain to be bought for just one thing. He shoved the unpleasant thought aside, pulled his hood further over his head, and kept walking.

He made it a block out of the square before he shuffled to a stop, the image of the girl in the cage with her hands bound burning a hole in the back of his head. He saw her carted away by someone cruel and faceless, saw the scars that would mar her face when he got bored of her.

What a waste.

He clenched and unclenched his fists, gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes at his own idealism as he tried to talk himself out of it. Then he whipped around with a growl and stomped back towards the merchant.

This was _such_ a bad idea.

"How much for the girl?" he asked, his voice all gravel and irritation with himself.

The slender purveyor smiled toothily, his eyes all but lost in the greedy wrinkles of his expression, and nodded with too much enthusiasm. " _Excellent_ choice, sir. I see you have an eye for quality. And I'll have you know that our entire stock is sourced from—"

"How much?"

"700 rupees," he chirped, and Link scoffed, turning.

"Thanks anyway."

"Did I say seven? I meant six," he meandered easily.

Link scowled, making one last ditch effort to change his mind. But then he met her eyes, all green and glittering as she watched the exchange through the bars, and his mind was made for him. He produced two golden rupees from his pocket and shoved them onto the counter, and the merchant gestured for her to be brought out. One of his bulky underlings unfastened the lock and reached into the crate to grab her arm in his fist like he was snatching a finch out of a birdcage. She screamed against the fabric in her mouth, twisting and putting up as much fight as she could while he lugged her over, the merchant gushing all the while over what a nice purchase it was.

He made a show of inspecting her—and he was, in a way, if looking for injuries counted—and then pulled the gag loose, wrenching her closer by the arm just as she made to shout again.

"Do you want to live long enough to see your homeland again?" he growled, hot and quiet, so it was just between them. He held her gaze, willing her to hear the promise buried in the threat, just waiting until he saw a glimmer of hope spark cautiously to life in her eyes, and then squeezed her arm a little tighter. "Then keep your head down and _keep quiet_."

He tossed her to his feet, ignoring the pang of guilt when she hit the ground on her knees. He could apologize to her later.

"You have quite a way with the merchandise, sir," the purveyor gushed some more, nodding approvingly. "Yes indeed, as soon as I saw you I thought to myself—"

Link stalked closer, snatching his collar in his fist. "And at the prices you're charging, I'll be very disappointed if I find out this merchandise has been _used_."

"No, no, of course not," he squeaked, his smile wobbling a bit and his hands held up to placate him. "Here, as a show of good faith!"

He fished a purple rupee out of the moneybox, just within reached. Link dropped him, scowling. That would have to do.

"Pleasure doing business," he said, and hefted her from where she had landed by the elbow.

He kept her bound as they turned and left the market, pinching her lightly when she looked back over her shoulder. Her eyes snapped back to her feet. He could feel her trembling as he guided her—still in shock, it seemed, or perhaps just terrified that she had misread him. They needed to find some place private to talk. Walking around with a girl that pretty was just asking for trouble.

He turned sharply and led her down an abandoned alley, stopping at a shady looking inn. He tossed ten rupees on the counter, and when the woman at the counter went to object, he murmured, "Just an hour."

She cocked an eyebrow without commenting on the ropes around his companion's wrists and slid a key over the knotted wood. He took it wordlessly, sighing out his nose at himself as he led them down the creaking hallway to the allotted room. This was not how he thought this day was going to go.

He led her inside and latched the door behind them, and then drew his knife to free her hands. She stiffened, her eyes fixed on the blade. But that was to be expected. He sighed again, slipping the tip under the ropes and cutting her loose in one clean motion. There were ugly red marks embossed on her skin from wearing them too long. He crossed the room to close the curtains, frowning.

"You have a name?"

"Zelda," she said quietly, and her soft voice thrummed down his spine like vibrations down the strings of an instrument. It was oddly familiar.

"Where are you from?"

"Hyrule."

"Clearly," he grunted. Fair skinned and blonde haired, those luminous green eyes of hers. She was as purebred as they come. "Where in Hyrule?"

"Castletown," she whispered, and he beat down a sigh. Of course she was from Castletown.

He pulled his hood down and shrugged the cloak off his shoulders, letting himself breathe a moment while he thought. Back through the Scablands, then, and possibly beyond the Ridge. But not into the heartland. Surely there was a battalion stationed somewhere he could leave her with that could escort her the rest of the way—or deal with her as badly as the men of Tabantha, he thought grimly, and clenched his jaw.

He could feel her eyes scanning his face, his arms, the tiny bit of midriff where his shirt cut off—everywhere the marks were exposed. He turned to meet her eyes, the sunlight streaming between the curtains alighting on the turquoise tattoo that stretched like a hand from his jawbone to just beneath his right eye.

"You're Faronian," she breathed, and he scoffed at her.

"What tipped you off?"

She averted her eyes, absently thumbing the imprints on her wrist. "I don't mean to stare. It's just that I was in Faron when I—"

She didn't finish. She sat of the edge of the mattress, shuddering, like her almost-sentence had exhausted her.

"When they took you?"

She nodded. She probably hadn't slept well in days, then. Faron was far. Though what a purebred Hylian girl was doing down as far as Faron he couldn't guess. Unless—

"On a pilgrimage?" he asked. She nodded again, and he groaned. "Gods. You're a _priestess_?"

Her lips tugged towards a frown, her eyes fixed on her hands in her lap, and something about her posture made her looked like she was collapsing in on herself. She whispered, "Something like that."

He rubbed his forehead. Why did everything have to be so complicated? Why couldn't he just do a good deed and get on with his life without being punished for it?

"Well, it's a comfort to know that the goddess will get all the credit for saving you from the traders," he sighed, and threw his cloak over his shoulders again. He crossed back to her and shoved the roomkey firmly into her hands. "I need to get supplies. Get some rest, don't let anyone in. I'll be back in less than an hour."

"Wait," she squeaked, life suddenly leaping back into her eyes, just before he closed the door. She was still shaking, but there was something about her—the way the sunlight touched her hair, maybe, or the way she looked at him, soft and grateful. It was the closest thing to holiness he had ever seen. "I don't know your name."

His lips twisted. It was something he wasn't fond of giving away. But he supposed she'd already cost him over 500 rupees. What was his name after that?

"Link," he said, and shut the door behind him.

He cut a trail back to the marketplace, which was crowded by now. He kept his head down, bought some dried meats and a little bread, and shelled out for a snowquill cloak. Farosh knew she was going to need it if she was going to survive roughing it through the Frontier in late autumn.

This unexpected journey also meant his plans of getting up into Hebra before the first snowfall were most certainly shot. But he couldn't very well send her marching home without him. She wouldn't make it as far as the city limits without getting snatched up by someone with ill intentions.

He sighed as he hefted his pack onto his shoulder and headed back towards the inn. Why hadn't he just kept his eyes on the road?

In the dank hallway, he rapped on the door to their hired room twice and Zelda swung it open without a moment's hesitation. He scowled at her.

"What if I had been someone else?" he growled, stepping in and snapping the door shut behind him.

Her brow furrowed. "Who else would it be?"

He sighed. Gods, she had no self-preservation instincts at all.

"That's not the point," he murmured, setting his satchel on the mattress.

There was a distinct wrinkle in the blankets where she had rested while he was gone. It seemed too round, too tiny. He tried not to imagine her curled up as small as she could make herself, golden hair splayed around her like rays of the sun, reciting the same prayers she had whispered in the confines of her cage. He pulled the snowquill cloak out of the bag.

"Try this on."

She nestled herself obediently into the fabric and pulled the hood over her head, wide-eyed. His lips twisted, and he pulled it down a little harder, trying to hide her face. It was useless. She practically _glowed_. He unraveled twine off one of the bundles in his pack and shoved it into her hands.

"Pull your hair back," he murmured, trying not to avert his eyes while she did, as though pretending the urge wasn't there would somehow make the feeling pooling in his gut go away. As though pretending he didn't feel like an unworthy wretch as she exposed the side of her neck would ease the guilt.

She pulled the hood back over her head when she was done and he scowled. All it had done was accentuate her sweeping cheekbones, the delicate lines of her jaw and the tip of her nose where they peeked out from the dark cloth. And those _eyes_. He wanted to fall headlong into them.

She managed, shrinking under his glower, "What's wrong?"

"You're too beautiful," he frowned. "You're going to cause me nothing but trouble."

She swallowed and ducked her head, and he sighed, pulling his satchel over his shoulder.

What a sight the pair of them would make: a tattooed Faronian in the mountains and a fair-skinned Hylian girl with eyes bright as Farosh's scales. So much for not drawing attention to themselves.

He led her briskly out of the inn, tossing the roomkey back on the way, and turned to weave southwest. They could follow the road to the Great Bridge, and then cut through the Scablands until they reached the Regencia River, and then… well. He would worry about getting her that far, first. As it was, he had to keep hissing at her to keep her head down.

Then, ducking closer to him as they walked, she murmured, "There were _children_ in those pens. You could have saved a half dozen of them for the price you paid for me."

He drew them up short, bristling at her sudden ingratitude. "Would you like me to bring you back? Let you tell that slaver that you want to sell yourself to free some orphans with no place to go?"

"No, I—" she stopped, those accursed eyes of hers boring so deep he felt like he was being seen through by Farosh itself. "I just meant… why did you choose me?"

Because he wasn't thinking straight. Because he was an idiot. Because the dragons seemed to enjoy a good laugh at his expense.

"Because your fate would have been worse than theirs," he said.

Maybe she couldn't understand that, coming from the sheltered heartland, where slavery was outlawed and a glittering army kept the outside world at bay. But the children were an investment. They would live in servitude—working grueling hours with harsh taskmasters for table scraps and the flimsiest of shelters—but they would be part of the enterprise, valuable to a businessman the same as a beast of burden.

But her…

He growled, "Come on."

They kept walking down the narrow alleys, splashed by shadow one moment and light the next as their path twisted along the buildings, and weren't far from the main road when he heard shuffling behind them. One pair of boots, and then two. Maybe nothing, and at the very least nothing he couldn't handle.

But then there were five pairs, and they were gaining.

He shrugged his pack off easily, passing it to her without looking back, and closed her hand tight around it with his own.

"When we turn the next corner," he murmured, "you snake up into the next alley to the left, and don't stop running until you reach the canyon, understand?"

Her eyes turned up to his, startled. "What are you—"

"Do you understand?"

She nodded, fingers biting harder into the satchel. They rounded the next bend.

" _Go_ ," he breathed, snapping back against the wall as she rushed down the next alley, glancing back at him with wide, shimmering eyes, and pulled out his knife, giving it a quick twirl to feel the balance.

The element of surprise on his side, he grabbed the first man to round the corner after them and plunged the blade into his neck. He struck true, the assailant collapsing with a gargle, and then ducked beneath an incoming fist. He danced under the arm, carving his knife smoothly between two of his ribs as he moved.

And when he came up on the other side, another fist met the underside of his chin with a crack, wrenching his feet out from under him and sending his dagger skittering across the cobblestones and landing him flat on his back.

He lolled, winded and skull rattling, as one of the attackers picked him up by the collar and drove him face first into the nearest brick wall. He saw red and stars, shoving off it with all his might and whirling to land his elbow on the man's jaw. Link lunged for his knife, barely wrapping his fingers around the hilt before he was hooked around the elbows and heaved back to his feet. They bludgeoned his stomach, his face, before he wrenched his arm loose and twisted it to stab the one restraining him in the abdomen. He went down with a heavy thud.

"She's getting away!" one called, and tore down the main thoroughfare after her. All the better.

Link turned and threw his knife, sending it cartwheeling after him until it sank with a satisfying thump into his back. That was three down.

He spun back just in time to leap out of the way of an incoming swing, the blade at the end of it glinting with knotted sunlight. He leapt back again, eyes trained on it, looking for an opportunity to disarm him. Fixating, like a fool.

A dense wooden plank cracked against the top of his spine, sending him gasping to his knees. The blade swiped against his cheek, and a fist followed as he caught himself on the wall, driving him to the ground coughing and sputtering, still trying to breathe through where it felt like his neck had shattered. Then he drove his boot into his stomach, hard enough that he heaved and his vision swam nauseating and rosy, and did it again. And again, and again, and again, until he was blind for stars and gagging on the taste of copper in his mouth.

"Leave him," the other hissed, and with one last kick to the head, they left him in a pile along the road, tearing off down the main artery.

Which was precisely where she wasn't.

He laid there for a long time, panting, his head throbbing and the rest of him aching something fierce. Blood trickled from the cut on his cheek and slipped beneath his chin, slick and sticky. And he was content to just stay put, wallowing in his own misery for a while, until he imagined her face. Until he imagined her helpless and lost at the edge of Tanagar Canyon, worried and radiant, as the sun set jealously behind her.

He pulled himself to his feet, groaning, and set off slowly, limping after her down the narrow side alley that spilled out into the wilderness.

This was _such_ a bad idea.


	5. Rescue

_Prompt No. 5  
_ _Word count: ~2170  
Universe: Ocarina of Time, sequel to "No. 2 — In the Hands of the Enemy"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink if you squint  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Chirophobia, Haphephobia_

**Rescue**

Link blinked in the harsh sunlight, shivering, as he came to. Water lapped at the shore in all directions, and the stone beneath him was pleasantly hot. It was a strange contrast to the ice that had settled in his middle, frosted over every bone and vein so that he could hardly breathe. He wanted to sprawl out on it and never move, just bake and bake until he forgot what it was to be cold and dark. Bandaged fingers rubbed at his upper arms, encouraging heat and blood flow with the friction. He glanced down at his exposed torso, littered with ugly welts the size of his fist, and swallowed a rise of bile.

"Hold on, Link," the Sheikah murmured, rubbing harder. "You'll warm up soon."

When he tried to speak, his throat was wrecked from screaming and days without water. It took him four tries to get the word out. "Navi?"

"She's fine," Sheik said, gesturing with his chin to Link's hat, draped over a tiny glowing figure on the ground like a tent. "Sleeping. She's exhausted."

He sagged a little, still quaking. Good. That was good. When her light went out, he had just assumed…

"She wanted to be awake when you came around," he murmured, his eyes crinkling just slightly, suggesting a sad smile beneath his mask. "Couldn't quite manage it."

Link nodded listlessly, letting his eyes slip closed, letting himself drift closer to sleep. But then the two hands on his arms felt like a dozen, grasping much too tight, and his eyes flew open again.

They were on the island above the temple at Lake Hylia. After an hour or so the shivering stopped, his body finally something akin to warm—so warm, in fact, that he asked Sheik to help him stumble to the shade of the desiccated tree overlooking the water—but the cold, the _deep_ cold, still lingered like a lump of scar tissue in his abdomen. Sheik cradled his neck and helped him drink—water, mostly, and a little potion to help him along. When Navi finally woke, she burrowed under his chin, her tiny arms reaching around him as far as they could go, and wept and wept. He tried to shush her, tried to tell her it was all right, but his throat was raw, and the feeling of her tiny hands pressed into the sides of his throat was making his skin crawl.

Sheik stayed with him, nursing him back to health, for two days. It was unusual; he and the bard were allies, certainly, but their relationship was transient at best. They had fought monsters side-by-side, worked together to put out the flames in Kakariko, rescued Gorons and Zoras in distress alike—the Sheikah seemed to have a penchant for appearing from the shadows when he needed him most—but he never stuck around.

Which is why it really should have come as no surprise that as soon as he was sure all of his limbs were in working order, he disappeared again.

"I don't know how long it will be before your strength returns," he had murmured, frowning. "I've… never seen anyone survive this before."

"Probably because they didn't have a Sheikah to watch their back," Link had said, wearing a weak half-smile as the bard drifted imperceptibly toward the shadows. "Thanks for rescuing me."

"If you ever need anything… well." His crimson eyes glittered a bit. "I'll know."

Link spent the rest of his recovery in Kakariko, downing blue potions when he plateaued, when he began to suspect that the Dead Head had been gorging itself on some kind of spiritual energy along with everything else it took from him. It didn't help much.

The villagers were kind to him—especially the older women, always clucking over him like a gaggle of mother hens, ensuring he had enough to eat and a comfortable place to spend the night. Always gasping and doting on him when they would see the welts all over his front that just wouldn't fade. But despite their kind intentions, he inevitably found himself craving Sheik's meticulous caretaking. They were eager and loving and warm, but he had been observant. He had noticed the way Link had begun to flinch at the slightest touch, the way the muscles in his face would jump when his hand would drift too close. The way his nightmares were always the same: hands and hands and hands, reaching for him in the dark. The women in town seemed oblivious.

He decided it best to leave when, while he had been eating a kindly offered bowl of stew, one of his mother hens reached out with a pudgy thumb to wipe a smudge from the corner of his mouth, and he grabbed her wrist in a snap reflex and stood so quickly he knocked the food over.

Navi had noticed long before then, keeping to herself unless he invited her to alight on his shoulder or slip into his pocket. Even then she kept her hands folded at her breast, fluttering her wings instead of reaching out when she needed to steady herself. He appreciated the gesture, of course. But mostly it just made him feel broken.

He wandered Hyrule, still disinclined to brave the trials of the Shadow Temple. But the longer he drifted, the worse his affliction seemed to get. Everywhere he went, he was hounded by ungentle reminders: the massive, leathery hands of the Gorons, so strong they could crush bone; the slender, silken fingers of the Zoras, that slipped so easily over Hylian skin; the tiny, fleshy palms of the Kokiri children, always grabbing at his legs or his hair or rummaging through his pockets. Things finally came to a head when, sparring at the Gerudo training grounds, he threw his opponent to the ground in a panic when her hand found his throat and nearly dismembered her at the wrist.

His travels took him back to Lake Hylia—as far from civilization (or the Shadow Temple) as he could reasonably get. He went back to the island and peeled off his tunic, and laid on the hot stone under the sun, trying to warm up that lingering cold spot, still knotted beneath the welts. When a shadow fell over his face, he didn't startle. He had almost expected it.

"So, you've given up, then?"

Link breathed deep, deep enough to stretch his ribs, to test how far the heat had penetrated. The cold scar in his gut pulled unpleasantly.

He whispered, "Maybe."

"Impa needs you."

"I know."

"The princess is counting on you."

"I _know_."

He sat up, frustrated, and watched the wind churn the surface of the lake. Sheik was always quick to tell him what he needed to hear, and much slower to tell him what he wished he would. What kind of a companion did that make him?

 _I'm not your companion. I'm your counselor_ , he had told him once. _Gods help me._

"Whatever that thing did to me," his said, his voice husky with memory and his hand lingering over the spot that wouldn't warm, "it isn't healing. There's something here, like a scar. It's always cold."

"I know," the bard sighed, finally moving to sit beside him in the grass. "I've seen the way you cradle it. Like it's something worth protecting."

Link bristled. "If you came here to say something, then get on with it."

"It isn't the scar in your body that's holding you back. It's the one in your mind. You're afraid of facing it again."

"And you fault me for that?"

"No. Only a fool wouldn't fear a Dead Hand. I fault you for letting your fear get the better of you."

"You're one to talk about fear," Link scowled, blood heating. "Always hiding behind that mask. Always hiding in the shadows while I throw myself down the throat of temples and dungeons at your bidding."

"If it was my place to challenge the temples," he murmured, an unfamiliar bite in his voice, "don't you think I would have done so long ago?"

Link narrowed his eyes at him. "You never even tried, did you? And you say I'm the coward."

"Don't you think I would have rather risked my life than be idle for seven years, watching Ganondorf burn Hyrule to the ground?" he snapped, crimson eyes sparking livid. "Don't you think I want to help Impa? That I can't stand the thought of her rotting down there? That I—"

He clenched and unclenched his fists, his jaw, grasping at silence. Grasping at control. Link waited, watching him simmer. It was so unlike him to be anything but impassive. It was bizarre. It was a harsh reminder that he really didn't know him at all.

"Then come with me."

"I _can't_."

He swallowed disappointment and directionless anger. The truth was he just wanted someone to blame. And he didn't want to be angry with the princess, who had begged for his help so long ago, or the gods, who might withdraw their blessing if he seemed ungrateful. Sheik on the other hand… he was easy to hate when he wanted. He embodied of all the ugliest parts of his destiny.

"You came in after me," he pointed out anyway.

The Sheikah frowned beneath his mask. "I had no choice. If you had died in that temple… I had to take the risk."

"Who's to say I won't die in the next one?"

"I have faith that you won't."

Link scoffed. "Then the gods might disappoint you."

Sheik shook his head, staring back over the water. Watching the lake glitter like there were answers in it.

"I meant faith in you."

Link looked over the lake too, frowning. "Then I might disappoint you," he amended.

"We're all afraid of something, Link," he said. "We all have terrible fears no one else could understand, even if they tried."

"Even you?"

"Especially me."

He snorted. "Like what?"

"Besides losing this war and watching Hyrule wither away at the hands of a tyrant?" He stopped for a moment, thinking. Imagining it. Then, "The look on your face when I tell you the truth."

Link waited, studying him. The Sheikah shadow. The bard. The guide. The stranger.

He asked, "The truth about what?"

"I can't tell you," he said quietly, slowly sliding his lyre from its place on his back. "Not yet. But soon."

Sheik settled the instrument between his hands, stroked the strings softly, like he was feeling for the beginnings of a song. He plucked a note, and the string trembled and hummed under his curled finger. Link imagined his spine vibrating like a harpstring, stroked and pulled on and plucked by intangible fingertips, and looked away.

"Close your eyes if it bothers you to see," he murmured. "Just listen."

Sometimes it was disconcerting how much he knew, how much he saw. But Sheikah supposedly always saw the truth. Maybe that was why they were so good at concealing it.

The song was nice. It was thoughtful and bittersweet, deceptive in the happy sounds of the melody. There was sadness in it, lingering in the discordant thrum of the sustain beneath. It didn't match the setting at all, with its sunshine and glittering water. But it matched their mood.

"I won't lie to you in this," he said, arpeggiating a slow series of refrains, "if you go back to the temple, what awaits you is nothing less than an embodiment of your nightmares."

He frowned, trying not to picture that penetrating darkness, trying not to hear the clang of the guillotine blades striking a steady rhythm like hands on a clock. Trying not to feel something more precious than his life draining from his body. He said, "The Dead Hand."

"No. Something worse." Sheik's hands stilled on the harpstrings, and the song faded, incomplete. "But if you will not brave the trials again, then Ganondorf has as good as won. There will be no one left to challenge him. He will eventually flush the princess out of hiding, and the kingdom will be lost."

"I could protect her," he hedged quietly, futilely, selfishly.

"Not from him. Not forever."

The wind whisked across the surface of the lake, making the water purl and Sheik's harpstrings drone, and Link sighed into it. He was right, about everything. As usual. He really hated that.

"I know. I just wish…" He trailed off. "Well. There's no point in wishing."

Sheik propped the lyre up again, sensing his acquiescence and satisfied by it. He left the old song behind, plucking something new. It was lovely and slow, swaying and swelling into the high strings and then falling back down, gentle as an autumn leaf. It sounded like something that ought to be sung. It reminded him of a woman's voice.

"Do you know where she is?" he asked. "Is she safe?"

"Just now?" The bard turned, his eyes crinkling above his mask to suggest a soft smile. "She's in the very safest place she can be."


	6. "Stop, please"

_Prompt No. 6  
W_ _ord count: ~3150  
Universe: Breath of the Wild, prequel to "No. 15 — Science Gone Wrong"  
Pairings: None. But actually Zelink.  
Rating: T  
Themes: Experimentation/test subject, torture_

**"Stop, please"**

The wizzrobes tittered as they dragged him through the snow, skipping along airborne ripples carrying them deeper into Hebra. "Mistress will be so pleased!" they sang, and when he struggled too much they would turn back, wicked smiles growing more feral deep beneath their pointed hoods, and take turns pacifying him with their ice rods. "What would mistress do?" they would scheme aloud, and then find some new and horrible way of punishing him, like wrenching his head back by the hair, prying his mouth open, and jamming the wand down his throat until he gagged on it and his lungs all but frosted over.

It didn't take Link long to decide that it might be better to let himself be dragged over the mountain and take his chances with the mistress.

When their destination was in sight—a simple stonework cottage tucked beneath the pines, billows of white smoke out puffing out of its chimney—they tittered louder, prancing bouncily down to the door. They thrust it open and flung him inside.

"Mistress, mistress!" they squealed as he hit the floorboards, and he braced himself to face the hideous creature that had abetted his kidnapping.

Only she wasn't hideous at all. The mistress was a young woman, with golden hair tamed neatly behind her head and verdant eyes that sparkled in a way that was entirely too clever. It made his heart stammer and his jaw clench. Because she was still his captor, beautiful or not. He craned his face up to glower, though it was a mite less impressive when he was so gorged with ice magic that his lips were blue and his breath was misting despite the warmth of the cottage.

Her eyes flickered over him once, twice, inspecting, calculating, and then she turned, gathering ingredients from the wall above her hearth.

"Mistress is pleased?" they twittered nervously. "Mistress is happy?"

"I am pleased," she sighed, though she didn't sound particularly so to him. They shrieked in delight, skipping cartwheels in the doorway while she finished her concoction. "Well done, boys."

She turned, taking his bound wrists and putting a lukewarm cup in his hands. Though the liquid didn't steam, something about the contents made his palms sting, but when he tried to flinch away she closed her hands tighter over his, compelling them to stay.

"Drink this," she murmured. "You'll feel much better. And that's worth a little pain, isn't it?"

He frowned, considering flinging the tea in her face just to demonstrate his defiance. But he was also acutely aware that he was literally freezing to death, and that morsel of knowledge kept him from acting out of spite. He downed it, trembling, eyes knitted shut, and his mouth opened too wide as the brew countered his condition and ejected the frost from his body in a great, white, misty whorl.

She cut the ropes on his wrists as he panted, recovering, and went right back to her business, dismissing the wizzrobes, who fled with a cackle, and leaving him to take in the room. The walls were lined with books and loose papers, shelves full to the brim with quills and inks and strange devices, jars full of fireflies and grasshoppers and butterflies, and vials housing all manner of extracts and elixirs and tinctures. Row upon row of strings ran over the mantle, from which hung orderly bunches of herbs and mushrooms, dried fish and dried meats, chains of dragon parts and clusters of tails and hooves and horns. It was the most bizarre collection he had ever seen.

"What are you," he rasped hoarsely, "some kind of a witch?"

"I'm a scientist, actually," she said, pulling a thick tome from one of the shelves, and he frowned deeper.

"What kind of scientist goes around kidnapping people?"

She sat down at the wide table slanting across the room and pried open the book, fanning through the pages until she found a fresh leaf, and pulled the quill from the inkhorn sitting haphazardly on the corner.

"So you assume scientists are ethical, but that witches lack moral decency," she posited, only glancing up at him when she finished scribbling several lines. "Curious."

And then a horrible clanging noise sounded from the chimney, thudding dully against the stones, and emerging along with the sound a milky, egg-shaped something crawled out from the hearth on creeping, spindly legs, and headed right for him. He lurched back and onto his wobbling feet, the whirring creature crowding him until his shoulders hit the door.

"Don't worry, it won't hurt you," she murmured, still writing. "Not unless I tell it to."

It propped itself up, planting its claws flat and stretching its bent arms until they were nearly straight, bringing its single, pulsing blue eye level with his own. It whirred and beeped and swiveled, leaning too close for comfort.

"What is it?"

"A Guardian," she said, and then amended, "Well. A miniature variety of my own creation. It's just reading your vitals."

It's eye flickered and sounded again, and a slate on her table came to life in tandem, throwing blue light all over the ceiling. She jotted down a few more lines as she scanned the display, the squat egg guardian returning to its usual spidery shape.

"And what exactly do you want with me?"

She paused, finally, setting her quill down to regard him thoughtfully. "I needed a test subject."

His fingers brushed the doorknob digging into the small of his back. The wizzrobes had gone, which meant he only had the mistress and her egg to deal with if he made a run for it. And the unforgiving Hebra backcountry. It wasn't ideal, but he would rather risk escape than subject himself to her insanity.

No sooner had his fingers closed around the handle than one of the guardian's jointed legs shot out from under it with startling speed, planting its claw against the door jamb. It hit so hard he wouldn't have been surprised if it left a dent in the wood. He carefully loosened his grip, and the egg pulled its arm back to itself with equal slowness. No escape, then.

He fixed her in a hard stare. "That sounds unpleasant."

"I suppose it is." She gestured across the table. "Sit down."

For a moment he stayed anchored against the door, thinking. His gaze slid lazily to the egg, its eye impassive and unfocused, staring somewhere through his middle. The urge to disobey out of spite was intense, but at the moment he had no where else to go.

He crossed the room and joined her at the table.

"I'm studying the unique properties of a variety of materials, many of which can be combined for increased potency in their effect and duration," she explained, and then waved her quill towards her herb wall. "That tea I gave you, for example. I brewed it using warm safflina from the Gerudo region."

"And it counteracted the ice magic," he led, and she nodded. "So you are a witch."

"No," she sighed, standing to scour her shelves again. "I don't invoke incantations or sacrifice livestock or demand firstborns for my rites. I observe, measure, and record. Anything that can be observed and measured is science."

She plucked a strange device from the rack, an orb or a cage pulsating with green-yellow light. It crackled as she placed it on the table, and then she grabbed another, setting it about two feet away so that they hummed at the proximity. And then she plucked her quill again.

"Place your hand between the two conductors."

He did, cautiously, suspiciously, and had no time to react when a bolt arced between them straight through his palm. He barked a cry, reflexively yanking his arm back and gripping tight at the wrist, and she tapped the face of the slate glowing beside her book.

"On a scale of one to ten, with one being only mildly uncomfortable, how would you rate the pain you just experienced?"

"Are you _serious_?" he hissed.

"Just answer the question."

He clenched his jaw, messaging the raw spot on both sides of his hand. Gods, he was really starting to hate her. But it had truthfully been more startling than painful. He frowned, "Maybe four."

"Hmm." She tapped the slate again, scribbled in her book, and then produced a vial and held it across the table without looking up from her notes. "Now ingest this."

"What is it?"

"A low-level elixir brewed from thunderwing butterfly extract and the conductive scales of an electric lizalfos tail."

"Witch," he muttered under his breath, and then knocked it back before she could retort. He grimaced, trying to scrape the aftertaste off his tongue by the roof of his mouth. "That was vile."

"Place your hand between the conductors again."

He scowled, but grudgingly obeyed. But when the electricity arced between the orbs, he barely tingled. His muscles still flinched, reacting to the energy coursing through him, but the discomfort was negligible. He lingered, watching the bolts arc at regular, flickering intervals.

"That's incredible," he finally admitted. "I barely even feel it."

"A one, then," she notated, and stood to fetch yet another something from her shelves full of horrors.

She brought him a glove—a truly strange thing that smelled too strong and shined like oil. It squeaked and grabbed and chafed as he pulled it on, leaving his hand within feeling clammy and confined. And then she tapped the slate a few times, and a deadly looking bolt as thick as two fingers arced steadily between the orbs.

"Once more."

He glared across the table. "Are you out of your mind?"

"Stop being dramatic. Trust me."

"You sent your goons to kidnap me and now you're using me for your sadistic pain tolerance experiments. I _don't_ trust you."

"This has nothing to do with pain tolerance," she scoffed. "I'm measuring your shock resistance. Now put your hand in the current or I'll have the guardian do it for you."

"I hate you," he said, and stretched his gloved hand into the beam.

Nothing happened. The current bent and buzzed, hungrily licking at his hand, looking for a flaw. But he was perfectly protected. He didn't even feel the tingling he had felt after the elixir. She rested her chin on her hand, drumming her fingers against her cheek and looking altogether wistful.

"I found this artifact down in Faron," she sighed. "Magnificent, isn't it?"

He nodded, his lips pressed into a thin line, and withdrew his hand, setting about the unpleasant task of struggling to get the glove off. "I've never seen anything like it."

She smirked at him, her eyes glittering as they met his through the arc of the current. "Then why are you scowling?"

"I just wonder why you subject others to your experiments, if they're so trustworthy," he sneered, slapping the wrested glove down on the table, "instead of performing them on yourself."

"Well, I would, except—" She held her bare hand out into the current, so quietly and easily he didn't have time to object. The electricity sparked and frothed and crackled. But she didn't so much as flinch. He felt as if his soul had left his body, watching her defy reason like that, and so fearlessly. She slipped her hand back out, and the back of it glowed with etched triangles, stacked into a pyramid and percolating light. "—for reasons I can't yet fathom, I'm exceptionally difficult to kill."

"And you think your experiments will help you explain that?"

"Maybe," she said quietly, shrugging a shoulder. She tapped the slate again, and the current shut off, and she sighed imperceptibly. "Do you want something to eat?"

She fed him, and gave him a comfortable place to sleep (under the watchful eye of her guardian), and then set about running more experiments on him in the morning.

Her name was Zelda. She was smart, demanding, constantly bubbling over about her work. He had learned much more than he ever cared to about herbology, archaeology, zoology, and other studies he wasn't sure had a name simply by listening to her murmur to herself.

Elixirs were made by boiling questionable ingredients together—usually bits of monster and critters that were uniquely adapted to certain environments—and then distilling the resultant fluids. Some ingredients were more effective if eaten rather than imbibed, such as certain fruits, vegetables, fungi, and meats (which he quickly discovered often meant that his meals were more tests in disguise). Different materials could even be added to increase the duration of those desirable effects, such as dragon horn, which she claimed could enhance it by as much as 30 hours, though she had yet to test that on him. (She was even working on a concoction to duplicate those fantastic results, something she called "monster extract," but she hadn't gotten the formula right yet.)

The effects were varied and amazing: increased strength, speed, stealth, durability, stamina, and resistance to intense heat, electric shock, and even freezing temperatures. He had lifted 300 pounds with one arm, ran a mile in well under three minutes, and jogged laps around the cottage for two hours straight without breaking a sweat, among other things, under the influence of her potions. Unfortunately, those effects wouldn't stack or combine. Which meant he had to pick and choose his abilities during his many escape attempts.

At first he had chosen speed, which did see him outrun the guardian with ease. But he was quickly turned around in the unfamiliar backcountry, and was miserably close to frostbitten by the time the egg found him and dragged him unceremoniously back to the cottage. The next time he tried strength, but even with the enhancement he wasn't able to crack the egg open (and it deftly prevented him from getting to Zelda, who he wasn't sure he would be able to damage much in any case). He tried again with the speed elixir, pocketing a few vials to keep him alive in the cold and increase his stamina afterward while he roamed the mountains, but he just couldn't get his bearings. After spending three hours lost in a blizzard he waved down the blasted egg when he spotted it on the ridge so it could lead him back to the house.

Zelda was an excellent timekeeper, as well, so he knew exactly how long he had been her reluctant test subject. 17 days. Some days were better than others—the ones that didn't include being electrocuted or holding his hands in the fire or testing his "durability," which usually amounted to various creative attempts to induce blunt force trauma while his skin resisted like armor. She had her slate on hand to read his vitals at all times, which he supposed should have been reassuring; but he found it often meant that when he was sure he was about to burn or catastrophically bruise, she disagreed. And she always pushed him to the very limit.

She fed him a hearty stew for lunch that day, stuffed with bass, durian, truffle, and radish. The odd flavor profile made him sure he was being subject to some sort of experiment, but he didn't feel much different. She tapped the slate as he shoveled more stew into his mouth, scrolling through data, and he rolled his eyes.

"Would you stop doing that?"

"What?"

"Checking my vitals every time I take a bite. What's the effect?"

She didn't meet his eyes, scribbling in her giant book. "Increased vitality."

That was a new one. And the way she wasn't bouncing around spewing details about how she intended to measure it made him nervous.

"And what is vitality, exactly?"

"It's hard to quantify," she sighed, getting to her feet. "You could say it's the thing that keeps us alive."

The guardian's claws clamped suddenly to his forearms, his shoulders, keeping him secured to the chair, and he glared at her, exasperated, as she rounded the head of the table. "I'm not going to run."

"It's not to keep you from running. It's to hold you still."

He tensed, watching the way she slid the slate over, checking the numbers again. Monitoring him far too closely.

Her eyes flickered to his, and she murmured, "I promise I won't kill you."

Then, with a sound like a star fragment falling out of the sky, the triangles on the back of her hand lit, and her eyes glowed, and she took a meaningful step closer and pressed her palm to his chest.

His mouth dropped open to draw breath where there was none. It was awful and godless. It was like his heart was being crushed in his chest. But it was more than that, more than pain. It was like the life was being pulled right out of him. He had never felt anything like it in his life.

"Stop," he gritted, breathless and writhing uselessly against the guardian. But they had only just begun, and she was intent. His heart, twisted and crushed, pounded so hard against the confines of her light he thought it might burst, and he couldn't keep himself from begging again, "Zelda, _stop_."

The light in her eyes and on her hand gleamed brighter, and he threw his head back and yelped, his hands clawing uselessly at the arms of his chair. The bones in his spine were compressing and cracking, twisting his ribcage up and open. His skin was splitting open from throat to navel and his insides were spilling out. He was sure of it. He could feel it.

" _Stop!_ "

His ribs were pulling apart so he was pried open, exposing his crushed, pumping heart and the other organs nearby. Maybe she was rearranging them, shoving a lung this way and his stomach up that way. Maybe that was why his ribs were stretching ever farther so he was agape like an oyster, wailing and screaming as she forced him apart as far as he would go and then pushed a little more.

Oh _gods_ , he was dying. He felt it sure as a cold night descending over the deepest parts of Hebra. Tears were streaming down his face, the horrible, animal roar of agony pulling from his throat a terrifying and unfamiliar sound. He was dying, he was _dying_ —

" _Stop, please!_ "

Her hand pulled away, and all at once he was whole.

He went boneless, gasping, and the guardian let him go. But where he expected blood and carnage, he seemed perfectly undamaged. He met Zelda's eyes where she stood across the room, rubbing her palm like it ached, and she turned without a word, taking the guardian with her to who knew where.

He panted, head lolling, and glanced over at the slate by his head. At his vitals.

The meter that indicated his vitality still read two-thirds full. She could have pushed him farther than that. Much father.

So why hadn't she?


	7. Support

_Prompt No. 7  
_ _Word count: ~2000  
Universe: Breath of the Wild, sequel to "No. 4 — Caged"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Healing magic, trauma_

**Support**

As it turned out, she was neither helpless nor lost.

When he finally found her at the edge of Tanagar Canyon, she had set up a decent camp, with a fire for heat and her cloak rolled up beneath her like a makeshift bedroll. She did seem worried though, a gentle line creasing that pretty brow of hers where the firelight splashed on her face, and though it could easily have been for her own safety and prospects after her guide was mobbed in the back alleys, he liked imagining it was worry for him. And wasn't that stupid?

She caught sight of him as he hobbled into the ring of the fire, eyes going wide, and shot to her feet.

"Link," she breathed, rushing to help him. He tried to wave her off, but she was insistent and flighty, eyes going everywhere as she took an inventory of the damage. After several false starts, she finally said, "Goddesses. I'm so sorry. Let me help you."

She slipped under his arm before he could tell her no and led him to the fire, easing him off his feet onto her cloak-turned-bedroll, and then back until his head rested in her lap. He almost objected, almost said he didn't need her nursing. But then she brushed his bangs out of his face and rested her hands on his shoulders, and every muscle in his body relaxed as light percolated out of her in soft, golden tendrils. He watched it float and undulate over his head, feeling suddenly, pleasantly numb.

"You're a healer," he mumbled, and she hesitated.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"It's fine," he said, too quietly, and closed his eyes.

It was a slow and gentle magic, thrumming over his body like a thick, languid ripple on the surface of a pond. He could feel the cut on his cheek knitting shut, the soreness of his bruises and stiff muscles ebbing. It was soft and tentative. It was nothing like the dragon magic.

The whole process took less than half an hour. Or maybe it was more. It left him feeling buttery and supple, like he had spent the healing suspended between reality and a dream.

Her fingertips, feather soft, traced the blue marks that curved down from his hairline to meet in the center of his forehead, the handprint on his cheek and the angular streak parallel to his jaw on the other side, and finally the arrows that jutted up out of his shirt to his collarbone.

"Having fun?" he murmured, and she stilled.

He peeled his eyes open, just a crack, to look at her. Her cheeks were flushed, but she mustered a small, abashed smile for him.

"I'm sorry. Most people fall asleep."

That didn't sound like a bad idea at all. He couldn't remember the last time he had been so relaxed. Still, he was on her cloak and in her lap. It seemed rude to fall asleep when it would mean she couldn't get any rest. He rolled onto his shoulder and then to his feet, stumbling a bit, only getting a few steps away before he decided it was a good idea to lay down again.

"Is all Hylia magic like that?" he sighed, his head hitting the ground with a heavy thud and his eyes falling shut again before he could stop them.

"Like what?"

"Gentle."

"Isn't yours?" she asked, timidly, and he puffed a drowsy laugh.

"No," he said.

And then he was gone.

He woke from the best sleep he had ever had in his life with the sunrise.

Zelda was slower to wake, and didn't seem nearly as refreshed. The healing must have drained her.

It was a half-day's journey from their campsite to the Great Bridge. They walked along the edge of the canyon until the terrain forced them back on the road, slipping between Nero Hill and Piper Ridge, and then between the Ridge and Rayne Highlands. The bridge was crowded with traders and pack animals, and this time when he hissed at Zelda to keep her head down, she listened.

By the time they crossed and he was leading her off the road, she looked dead on her feet.

"Just a little farther," he murmured. "We can rest in the Scablands."

She nodded listlessly as they started into Seres. Her feet dragged through the grass and stumbled across the stony banks, and he realized they weren't going to make much more progress that day. He found them a lonely place beneath one of the massive dragon blood trees, and she collapsed against the trunk while he pulled some supplies out of his pack. He passed her the canteen and some dried meat, but she barely touched either before she shut her eyes, her chest rising and falling in great, sleepy swells.

He didn't mind. A few extra hours of sleep was paltry compensation for the favor she had done him the night before.

When she finally stirred again, the sun had already set. She sat upright with a gasp.

"Oh no."

He turned, splashed in firelight, smirking at her contrite expression. "It's fine. You needed it."

She eased herself closer to the heat and he handed her a little food; he half expected her to devour it, having walked most of the day and exhausted from her earlier ordeal besides, but she only nibbled thoughtfully.

There was a distinct quiet to that place. The birds had all roosted for the night, and the pebbled ground wasn't full of the usual critters that buzzed and chirped once twilight fell. And with the trees towering so unbelievably high above them, it was easy to feel very small, and very alone. Maybe that was why he liked Seres so much. He felt left alone.

"Can I ask you something?" she asked, so quietly it hardly disturbed the silence.

He slipped a piece of meat into his mouth, glancing at her sidelong, and nodded.

She hesitated, lips tugging down, but then steeled her nerves and got on with it. "Do you really not believe in Hylia?"

He tried not to roll his eyes. But he really should have seen this coming. He laid back on the grass and pebbles, folded an arm under his head, and stared at the glitter spattered across the night sky.

He said, "I don't believe in what I can't see."

"You don't see the wind," she countered, "but you feel it. You see it affecting the world around you."

"That's very clever, Priestess."

She grimaced. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to undermine your beliefs—"

"Don't you?"

She didn't answer. And part of him was content to just roll over and let the conversation die there. But she was holding her knees to her chest, her mouth pressed against her shoulder, and a pang of guilt gnawed in the pit of his stomach. Hylia was all she had known her entire life. She didn't bear the blame for her ancestors' holy war.

"The White Goddess shed her divinity and was reborn mortal, right?" he breathed, and she turned, nodding. "She helped destroy an ancient evil that threatened to swallow the world. Then what?"

"They say she fell in love with the hero who fought beside her, and together they planted the seeds that would become the kingdom of Hyrule."

"And then?"

Her brow furrowed. "I don't understand."

"Did she have children? Grow old? Die?"

She sighed, looking up to watch the stars. "I suppose so."

"Then who do you think is listening when you pray to her?"

She laughed, a humorless, breathless sound, and turned that gentle, feather soft smile on him. "You must think me very silly."

"No. But I do wonder who you're trying to appease."

Her mouth twisted a little in thought. "You… worship the dragons, don't you?"

"Faron draws its power from Farosh," he admitted. "We don't owe anything to Dinraal and Naydra, but they walk the skies with Farosh, so we worship them all."

She sounded almost wistful. "When you pray, do you think they listen?"

A cynical smile bloomed slowly over his mouth. "No. I think they hardly know we exist."

"But you still pray?"

His smile grew. The irony wasn't lost on him. "I do. The first time I saw Farosh sky-walking… I don't know how to explain it. I felt insignificant and grateful and thunderstruck. It made me want to pray." And then, more quietly, "It still makes me want to pray."

"That's beautiful," she said softly, earnestly, and then shook her head. "I was taught to pray as a little girl. I didn't think much of it then. It wasn't until I was older that I realized how many times prayer had guided me when I felt lost. I guess both of us can't help but pray, now."

"A lot of good that does us. Your gods are dead, and mine are indifferent."

"Then maybe we aren't praying to appease anyone," she mused. "Maybe we're praying for ourselves."

He turned his eyes up again, watched the night sky sparkle and dim. He imagined one of the great dragons sky-walking, blotting out the stars with its breathtaking shadow, and felt the corner of his mouth lift.

"Maybe so."

That night he dreamed of a girl—a priestess?—in a flowing white dress, praying at three springs in three corners of the world, praying for strength and for wisdom and for courage, and the despair on her face when she realized that the goddess to whom she had been praying was herself.

He dreamed of a boy hiding in the underbrush, watching soldiers bearing gilded banners torch a village, feeling the unreal heat of the fire licking overhead, hearing the screams of those trapped in the blaze. Watching as the great dragon Farosh sky-walked overhead and did nothing.

He dreamed Zelda was straddling him beside the fire, kissing him senseless, and he was too blissed-out to do a thing about it.

The next morning they crossed the Scablands.

They walked until they reached the road where it forked to the north and south, but when he turned towards Castletown, Zelda froze in place.

"Not that way," she said, and he looked back at her, puzzled.

"It's the fastest way into Castletown."

"I can't go through the Breach," she said, shaking her head too adamantly, hugging her arms too tight. "I can't."

"It will take _days_ to go around," he argued, but her feet stayed planted.

"I'm sorry. I won't do it." She licked her lips, pursed them. "I understand if you need to leave. You've done more than enough."

He blinked. Parting ways was inevitable, of course. He hadn't even planned on taking her farther than the quarry. He just… hadn't anticipated it happening so soon. He nodded once.

She frowned just a little, gesturing uselessly. "I have no way of repaying you out here."

"I didn't do it expecting to be repaid."

"I know."

The silence stretched, the moment hanging between them like an unspoken regret. But then she offered him that small, feather soft smile from the night before, and time unspooled again.

"Thank you, Link," she said, "for everything."

And then she turned, following the south road. And there was nothing for him to do but turn west again toward the Frontier.

He didn't get far, listening to the sounds of their boots crunching on the road moving in opposite directions, before his feet shuffled to a stop beneath him. She might not be able to find her way. She might encounter highwaymen, even in a place as civilized as Nima. She didn't have supplies. He imagined her lost. He imagined her cold and hungry. He imagined her spending the night in the rain because she didn't know enough to see the signs of a storm.

This was stupid.

"Zelda, wait," he called, spinning to chase after her.

She turned, her eyes brightening in relief.

She had a smile like the sun.


	8. "Don't Say Goodbye"

_Prompt No. 8  
_ _Word count: ~2020  
Universe: Ocarina of Time  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Character death, grief, loss, time travel_

**"Don't Say Goodbye"**

Link held Zelda in his arms the day she died.

Her lips were too pale, her pulse too faint, as she rested her head on his shoulder. She felt so fragile and feather-light it made his stomach twist.

"I have loved every moment of this," she whispered, her eyelids heavy and her smile distant. "I wouldn't change a thing."

"Rest now," he said, laying his cheek on her hair.

But she knew better. She always knew better.

"I'm sorry we have to say goodbye," she sighed, her eyes vibrant and glistening to the last, and he tried to swallow his heart down out of his throat.

"Then don't say goodbye."

She took her last breath in his arms, and then she was gone.

They buried her alongside her mother and father in the Temple of Time. Dignitaries came from all corners of the country to pay their respects, and the kingdom declared an official period of mourning. Bards and minstrels wrote songs. They said she was the fairest, kindest, wisest ruler Hyrule had ever known. They said she would never be forgotten. And Link spent the whole ordeal fingering the blue instrument in his pocket.

Because there was so much he would change. He wouldn't have let her put him off when he said she seemed more tired than usual. He would have brought doctors to diagnose her condition earlier. He would have torn her from her work and forced her to rest when she insisted on being stubborn. He would have brought her to the healing fountains when she was still healthy enough to travel.

He would have saved her life.

So, one night, riddled with grief, he brought the Ocarina to his lips and played.

There was a rush of magic, every molecule in his body palpitating as they scrambled to compensate for the displacement. But outside of the way he couldn't seem to catch his breath, nothing seemed to have changed. He was still in their room, in the dark, the town outside the window glimmering with stars and lantern light. Maybe, with the Sage of Time gone from the world, the Ocarina had lost the powers it once had.

But then there she was, standing in the doorway in her night slip, splashed with candlelight as she set down her chamberstick.

"What's the matter with you?" she asked, braiding the end of her hair with a bemused smile on her face. "You look like you've just run a mile."

He crossed to her and kissed her, breathlessly, reverently, whispering her name wherever he could in relief. She slipped her arms around his neck, her braid tumbling loose and forgotten, and smiled against his mouth.

"What's gotten into you?"

"The date," he breathed, hands biting possessively into his waist. "What's the date?"

She told him. It was five weeks before the day she died. That wasn't much time.

He had all the castle physicians brought in, even though it was close to midnight. They all took turns measuring her pulse and feeling for fever and checking her throat and her eyes while Link paced like something feral at the foot of her bed.

They told him she was in perfect health.

"You're not _fine_ ," he had hissed, after she put a stop to his near-violent tirade and dismissed the terrorized doctors. "You're sick. And you'll be dead before autumn's end."

She crawled under the covers and coaxed him into bed beside her, and he put his arms around her and told her everything. He told her how quickly her condition had progressed. He told her how the country had mourned. He told her how he was going mad with grief, and how he had come back to save her and to save himself. He told her over and over again how much he loved her.

She went with him to a fairy fountain the next day, bathing in its healing waters and letting the fairy spirits sprinkle her with magic. She ate well. She rested often. She cut her workload in half, and then again when Link still wasn't satisfied. They spent every waking moment together, and the rest nestled in each other's arms.

But exactly on time, her symptoms appeared, and just as the trees turned bare, she was gone.

He laid a kiss on her forehead, whispering apologies and promises, and played the Ocarina again.

The next five weeks were more disciplined than the first. A cup of blue potion with every meal. Bathing at the fairy fountain as many nights as they could get away. Even visiting the Great Fairy more than once, asking for magic, or wisdom, or a miracle. But she still declined, her life draining inexplicably away and Link forced to watch it again, powerless to change it.

"I'm sorry we have to say goodbye," she said, like she always did, and he was still listening to her last breath as he brought the Ocarina to his mouth.

He spent the next five weeks studying in the library, researching symptoms and illnesses and treatments and cures. He spent the five weeks after that gathering all manner of strange ingredients, eyeball frogs and odd poultices and Great Fairy's tears, carefully trying to work out a cure—did she feel any stronger? had her appetite improved any? was it any easier to breathe?—but nothing ever changed. He started the next cycle by asking her what he should do, hoping in her wisdom. She told him to stop playing with fate. But he couldn't leave well enough alone.

So he played the song again, and again, and again, and watched her die again, and again, and again.

It wasn't long before he lost count of the songs, the weeks, the deaths, the restarts.

"You need to let me go," she had told him once. More than once. Sometimes rosy-cheeked, curled up in her night slip in his arms on that very first night. Sometimes pale and weak, on the very edge of death. He always pressed a lingering kiss to her hair and told her the same thing.

"I'm sorry. I just can't."

So the weeks bled into months, and they bled into something else. It was the same scenes, the same days, the same arguments, the same grief, endlessly repeating in a cycle he couldn't vanquish and that he wouldn't break. It was a strange way to live. Zelda said it wasn't living at all.

Link stood by the window, staring through the spangles of dust glittering in the sunbeams and fingering the Ocarina in his pocket.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, her voice small and feathery.

"You die tomorrow," he murmured, tracing the smooth, reassuring porcelain with his fingertips. "I was thinking about what I'll try next time around."

"I see."

He turned, glancing at his wife where she was cradled in a veritable cloud of white pillows. "I'm sorry. That sounded callous. I haven't given up on you yet. I'm just…"

She reached for him before he could finish, ushering him over wordlessly, and tangled her fingers in his as he sat on the edge of her bed.

"You're tired," she said. "I can see it in your eyes."

"A little. Nothing to worry yourself about."

"How long have you been doing this? Trying to change the future?"

"I don't know," he murmured. "A few years, maybe."

She arched an eyebrow at him, like she could sense how conservative an estimate that had been. "And how many times have I tried to talk you out of it?"

He smiled grimly, leaning to press a kiss to her forehead. "Too many times. If it's all the same to you, can we skip it this time around?"

"I can't remember the last time I played that ocarina," she sighed wistfully, and he nodded.

"It's been a very long time."

"Can I play it?"

"What makes you think I have it?"

She scoffed weakly. "You never let it out of your sight. And you've been fingering it in your pocket for the last half an hour."

He produced it, smirking, and laid it gently in her hands. She cleared her throat, setting the mouthpiece to her lips. The note came out shaky, and she had to cough before she could try again.

"Let me," he said, but she shook her head, setting her lips against it again.

"You don't know this song."

He didn't. It was melancholic and aching, full of beautiful refrains that lingered on long, low notes and ended in a climbing dissonance that never resolved. It sounded like grief. It sounded like the piece of his heart that was still screaming from losing her the first time. It sounded like being lost. Like being lost in a cycle that wouldn't end.

He looked away, towards the sun streaming through the window, not sure he could stand to listen to the rest. Not sure he could stand to hear how it ended.

And then he heard the porcelain crack.

His eyes jumped to the instrument in her hands, to her eyes, blue as the summer sky, vibrant and glistening to the last, as she struck the last, resonant, high note of the dissonance, as high as the Ocarina would play. Then light poured out of spidery veins that spread from the windway to the toneholes, and it shattered before he could so much as shout.

The porcelain rained down in bits and pieces into her lap, and Link dove as if to catch them, panic rising in his throat. He traced the jagged edges, trembling, knowing there was nothing for it. Knowing that what the Sage of Time had chosen to destroy could not easily be put together again.

"No," he begged, pawing at the fragments, desperately trying to piece them together anyway. "Goddesses, Zelda, what have you done?"

"Please don't waste our last day together being angry with me," she whispered, her mouth twisting as she tried to force a smile and tears tumbling down her face.

He swallowed fury and panic. She was right. She was always right.

"No, no, of course not," he breathed, gathering her hands up in his and pressing a long, lingering kiss to her knuckles. "I'm not angry with you. I'm just…"

_Lost. I'm lost without you. Please don't go. Please._

"I'm sorry, Link," she whispered. "I can't stand the thought of you doing this to yourself anymore. I just can't. Please understand that. I want you to live your life."

His lips pulled down and his brow peaked, eyes shutting too tight as the weight of it struck him, as he finally gave way to tears and told her the truth.

"I _can't_. I don't know how to live without you. I don't want to know how."

"Yes, you can," she said, reaching up to cup his cheek in her hand. "Find the courage."

"I'm so sorry, Zelda," he quavered bitterly, covering her hand with his own and holding it close. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you."

"Don't be, my love." She mustered a watery smile. "It just wasn't meant to be."

He gathered her up into his arms gently, and she tucked herself under his chin, resting her head on his chest the way she liked. He shuddered at the hauntingly familiar sensation of her shallow breaths, of her hand resting too softly against his neck, and leaned his cheek against her hair.

"I love you," he said, and he felt her sigh.

"And I love you. I'm sorry we have to say goodbye."

"Then don't say goodbye," he whispered, the words falling from his mouth like the last leaves of autumn.

She took a breath. And then she went still.

He held onto her for a long time, still not ready, for all his running, to face the end of the song. The resolution to the dissonance. He just didn't have the courage.

It was a fitting punishment from the gods that only now, when he was powerless to alter it himself, did time diverge from its unchangeable course.

It had taken her a day early.


	9. Ritual Sacrifice

_Prompt No. 9_ _  
_ _Word count: ~1410  
Universe: Breath of the Wild, prequel to "No. 14 — Fire"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Mating instinct, nonconsensual kissing_

**Ritual Sacrifice**

By the time Link was born, Father was very, very old.

"My time is coming," he would often say. "I need to teach you while I still can."

He taught him the importance of control. He taught him the power of instinct. He taught him the art of disguise, and the destructive potential of carelessness. He taught him the necessity of loneliness. But most of all, he taught him that when he heard the song, he would be absolutely powerless to resist it.

Link fought him tooth and nail on that count. If the call of the song would overpower him anyway, what was the point of control, of loneliness, of disguises? Father would shake his head and tell him that his youth and inexperience needed to be burned out of him by fire.

And then Link helped him out to the West Mire, where he changed back into his true form and left his bones among the Ones who came Before, and Father was gone.

He slipped into his disguise and slipped back into the world, and even though he was surrounded by men and creatures of all shapes, he thought for the first time in his life he truly understood loneliness.

For years he wandered on his own, drifting among cultures and cities, watching and learning what he could. The Rito taught him to listen to the wind. The Gorons taught him the language of earth and fire. The Zoras taught him to tame water. The Hylians he avoided, though he masqueraded as one. They were the singers of the song.

Sometimes he indulged in trueshape, when he was in the most isolated places—in Hebra, or beside the Akkala Sea, where he wouldn't be noticed or bothered. And sometimes he thought, for all the strangeness and diversity of the world, those were the times he liked best: the stolen moments of peace, of silence, where his nature didn't feel so burdensome.

Maybe that was why Father taught him that loneliness was necessary—not just for the safety of others, but because he knew, in some small way, it would mean his own contentment.

And then he heard the song.

It struck him like a mallet to the spine, so earth-shattering his vision went red and milky and he fell to his knees. He sloughed off his disguise, writhing into the air, obeying the call. Following it east, east, _east_ , where he could hear it clearest, where the pounding in his head eased enough that he could see where he was flying. Following it straight to Mount Lanayru.

His eyes were sharper in his trueshape. He could make out the posts they had fastened to Naydra's altar, and the girl, dressed in white, tethered to them by the wrists, her arms spread in offering. He could see the way the ropes dug too tight, the way the exposed flesh on her arms pebbled in the mountain air, still frigid in the midst of summer. He could see the way her eyes, green, glistening, turned skyward hopelessly, the way her golden hair tangled across her shoulders when the wind struck her back. He could see the crowds around her, chanting to the rhythm of so many drums, their song torturously similar to the one screaming in his head. The one that was coming from _her_.

He could see his reflection looming in her irises as he got nearer, shadowy, fearsome, leathery and scaled and his wings full spread as he angled his talons to tear her from the altar.

 _Run_ , the last, lucid part of him said. _Don't do this_.

But it was such a small voice, and the song was so strong.

The dragon ripped her from the mountaintop and carried her as far from there as he could.

He flew mindlessly toward Hebra, toward the loneliest peak, the loneliest place. Toward the closest thing he had to a home. The song still pounded a fierce refrain in his head, coloring his vision rosy, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. It wasn't dragging him east or in any other direction. It was with him, pulsing out of the girl clutched in his claws.

He barreled into the cave nestled beneath North Peak and set her down. She was shivering and gasping, her skin too red and raw from the flight and her breath escaping her in puffs of mist. He leaned closer, letting his breath wash over her in a great, white whorl and block out the perpetual Hebra winter. Her scent rushed up into his nostrils as he made to breathe on her again, heady and perfect, fueling his drunken stupor. It made the song pulse louder. It made the fire in his chest burn brighter. The ambient temperature in the cave must have gone up a few degrees.

But oh, her _scent_. He couldn't get enough of it. He wanted more. He wanted to taste it. He wanted—gods, what did he want?

He shed his trueshape in a flutter of wing and shadow, receding into his disguise.

"You're Hylian," she breathed, and her voice and the song weaved over one another in perfect harmony.

"I can be," he murmured, very disinterested in talking even if her voice was so lovely, closing the sudden distance between them and kneeling.

He brought her hand to his mouth, inhaling, tasting, letting her fingertips spread softly over his eyes as he experimented with her palm, tasting with his lips, with his teeth, with the flat of his tongue. It went straight to his head, clouding it until he was dizzy, until his chest was alight and bothersome. He tipped his head back and loosed the fire in a great spiral, singing his own lips in his haste, and the cave warmed a little more.

He was on her again quickly, sliding down to her wrist, and exploratorily sucked the soft flesh there. She gasped from the heat when he swirled his tongue over her pulse, and the haze got thicker, hotter. He dragged her closer by the back of the neck, ignoring the startled cry that shot up into the cavern ceiling, searching for her heartbeat in other places, savoring that tantalizing flavor when he found it in the artery in her throat. He trailed upwards in a daze, sipping her jaw, her chin, dismissing the strangeness of the salt on his tongue as inconsequential.

It was the song, drowning out everything else.

 _The song_.

He blinked sluggishly, his eyes drawing properly into focus for the first time since that hypnotizing aria had brought him to his knees, lingering inches from her mouth. Her people had offered her up to the dragon, and he had taken her, dragged her across the world into Hebra—to what? Assault her? Devour her? He didn't know.

He let her go. She stayed perfectly still, her breath shallow and quick—and not necessarily looking terrified of him, either, he noted with an ugly mix of curiosity and self-loathing. He stood to give her some space—to give _himself_ some space. And as soon as he did the song crashed down on him again like a hammer, crippling and painful and insistent.

He gripped his head, falling to his knees again, and tried not to listen. He tried to hear the wind, hear the language of earth and fire, hear the mountain whispering all around him, but it was no use. The song was a river he couldn't tame, roaring louder, and louder, and _louder_. He blocked his ears and clenched his teeth as it reverberated down his spine, as it shook him so hard he was sure his bones would crack. But the more he tried to get away, the farther he tried to drag himself from her, the more ear-splitting the sound.

He trapped himself against a wall and collapsed beside it, hands still clawing at his head even though he knew it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. His throat was parched and his lungs were seared from the heat. His skull felt like it was splintering. He wanted to melt back into his trueshape, but he was afraid of thrashing, of accidentally crushing the girl with a whip of his tail or beat of his wing.

He looked for her, watched her rise to her feet through dappling red and blinding flares.

Even through all that, he thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.


	10. Trail of Blood

_Prompt No. 10  
_ _Word count: ~1080  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: None  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Puncture wound, hidden injury_

**Trail of Blood**

_"And stop following me!"_

Zelda rolled onto her shoulder with a huff, gripping the edge of the bedroll too tight. She couldn't get her outburst out of her head—the way she had foolishly let her anger get the better of her, the way she had let him see how out of control she felt…

The look on his face when she had shouted, all piercing blue eyes and confusion.

She would rather he had shouted right back, or rolled his eyes at her tantrum. But instead he just… stood there and took it, looking lost. Like a dog being scolded by its master.

She had wanted it to feel good. She had wanted him to feel a fraction of the sting his existence made her feel, and then revel in his discomfort. And now that she had done it, all she felt was guilty. Curse him.

The truth was, he hadn't deserved it. Her problems with her power, her father, and her kingdom were her own, and on a purely intellectual level she knew that making her feel worse about her failings with his many accomplishments was probably unintentional. He was doing his job, and no amount of shouting or reason from her was going to make him any less able to defy the king.

She rolled over again to the flat of her back, glaring at the stars. She wasn't going to get any sleep like this.

She chanced a look across the murmuring fire to his bedroll. He wasn't there—he had slipped away, and she might have thought he had been fooled into thinking she was asleep if not for her constant tossing and turning. He had been gone a while, which was unlike him. She propped herself up onto her arms, looking beyond the ring of the fire for signs of him, but he was nowhere in sight. That was unlike him, too.

One of the horses snorted in the dark. She frowned, moving to feed the fire some more with the pile of logs he had gathered. The wood flared and crackled as it met the embers, lighting the circle a bit more, and she stared at where he had been a little harder, color seeping back into the world. There was a spot of blood on his bedroll.

She thought back to the moblins she had inadvertently alerted to their presence while she was stomping around in a fury that afternoon, to the way he had snatched her out of danger in the nick of time and motioned for her to stay put while he took care of them. She had seen the streak of red on the side of his tunic then, welling up where he had been grazed pushing her out of harm's way. _Just a scratch_ , he had said in that low, rare murmur of a voice. And then he had dispatched them with his usual efficiency and wandered back to where she was waiting, arms crossed and a pout on her face, with moblin blood smeared on his cheek.

But scratches didn't keep bleeding hours later. She snatched a torch out of the saddlebag propped between their bedrolls, fully intending to storm after him and shout at him again for downplaying his own injury when, had she known about it, she could have been less difficult and insistent on finishing her research and made sure they made it back to the castle before nightfall so he could get medical attention. Because the last thing she needed was another reason to feel guilty on his account!

The fire caught on the torch and she lifted it in the direction he had snuck off. She was expecting bootprints or quashed undergrowth.

She wasn't expecting another smear of blood on the grass, even larger than the first.

She frowned at it, her anger momentarily forgotten, and followed it to another splash of red on the brush, and then another. Following a trail of blood farther and farther from their camp. When she spotted him, moonlit and kneeling at the water's edge, she smothered her torch in the dirt. Suddenly realizing she might be caught. Suddenly realizing he might not want her here.

She crept closer, peering at him from behind the trunk of a tree. She watched him, heart racing, as his fist twisted where his tunic was pulled up to his ribs; as he braced himself, teeth clenched, breath quickening; as he wrenched something barbed and hideous from his side with a strangled cry and dropped it, glistening and dripping, into the water. It glinted in the moonlight as it plunged from his hand to the surface. A dragonbone arrowhead.

He twisted and the wound caught light, all dark and wet and colorless under the moon, and she had to look away as he washed it out, face tipped back and strained as it touched the current, as he hissed and panted his way through beginning to dress it.

She planted her back against the tree trunk, on the brink of tears. Why would he do that? Why hadn't he said something? Why had he let her…?

She grabbed the torch and ran, stumbling through the brush towards the distant light of their campfire, and dove back into her bedroll, gasping. She wiped her stupid, _stupid_ tears from off her cheeks. Now she really wouldn't get any sleep.

Writing. Writing her thoughts down helped her get them in order. And sometimes helped her make sense of them.

She grabbed her journal from her saddlebag, staring at the page for a long time.

_I said something awful to him today…_

She wrote down their encounter at the shrine, and the tangle of bitterness and guilt that had come afterwards. She fidgeted, pen poised to put down more. But then she closed the book.

No. Perhaps… not everything was meant to be put down on paper.

She tucked her journal away and curled back up under her blanket, and when he wandered back to the camp later, she pretended not to hear him. She pretended not to hear his shallow, uneven breaths as he settled beside the fire. She pretended not to hear her own vitriolic rebuke from earlier in the day, even more biting and ungrateful than she remembered.

She sniffled, and, attentive as ever, he didn't pretend not to notice.

"Princess?"

"Go to sleep, Link," she hissed.

He didn't speak to her again. She pretended that was what she wanted.


	11. Defiance

_Prompt No. 11  
Word count: ~1840  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 7 — Support"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Lies, destiny, surrender_

**Defiance**

They journeyed two days on the river road, slipping between the Coliseum and the Plateau before it spit them out into Hyrule Field, and Zelda spent most of it getting quieter.

Link hadn't thought much of it at first, attributing her silent spells to fatigue or how easy it was to get lost in daydreams when the road seemed to stretch on and on. But by the time the spires of Hyrule Castle were glinting over the wall in the distance, her jaw was all but knitted shut, and that bright smile of hers seemed permanently locked away. But it was hardly his business to pry into her thoughts, dark though they seemed to be. Though he would be lying if he said her sudden reticence didn't leave him feeling bereft.

Their last night in the fields he built a roaring fire. He laid beside it a long while, watching the stars. She stared into the flames, watching her demons.

"I have to tell you something," she finally said, and he craned his head to look up at her. She was so slanted from that angle she was nearly upside down. Nearly floating, drifting skyward with the sparks. "I'm not who you think I am. I'm not just a priestess."

It had been a while since he'd thought of her as _just_ anything. But he kept that to himself.

He fixed his gaze back on the stars. "All right. Tell me."

"You'll hate me," she warned him.

He scoffed. "I doubt that."

He found the glittering cluster that made the shape of Dinraal's Horn, the vague impression of the Hero and the Lynel, locked in eternal, celestial combat, the powerful, curled legs and four eyes of the Lord of the Mountain, before she spoke again.

She whispered, "I'm the Daughter of Hylia."

His blood slogged thick and hot through his veins. He propped himself up on his elbow to stare at her properly. She looked small and contrite, and impossibly beautiful—and only now did he see it, how impossibly, _impossibly_ beautiful she was. Too beautiful to be earthly. He had never felt more of a fool in his life.

"You?" he demanded, feeling breathless. Because there wasn't a soul alive in Faron who didn't know that name.

And to think he had been so quick to absolve her of her country's wars.

She grimaced. "It gets worse."

He sat up with a sigh, frowning, and faced her squarely. He knew there would be nothing about this that he would like. He steeled himself and gestured for her to continue.

"I had a dream—a vision," she explained, forcing herself to meet his eyes. "It showed me Hylia's Chosen One. I couldn't see his face, but I could see what he was. A man of Faron."

Her words sat between them like a stone. He didn't want to believe it. Didn't want to believe that he had let himself be so manipulated. But it made too much sense for it to be true. He finally loosed a breathy, sardonic laugh. There wasn't much else he _could_ do.

"I can't believe I was so naïve," he murmured, getting to his feet, and she clambered after him.

"Link, wait—"

"Forgive me, Your Grace," he deadpanned, "but I have no intention of being a pawn in another one of your wars."

His eyes held hers for a charged, burning moment. She clamped her jaw and held her arm at the elbow, silenced. She looked like a girl then, young and lost and insecure. And that was the illusion. He turned towards the darkness and marched off.

"Where are you going?" she called behind him.

He didn't deign to answer, even though a thousand scathing retorts leapt up into his throat. It only seemed fair that she be left swimming in questions and uncertainty for a change. Just like the rest of the mere mortals she walked amongst.

He walked with no destination in particular. The plains were cold and gusty, whipping at his cloak, pulling him this way and that. It was a miserably accurate parallel to the disorder in his head.

His anger was dragging him towards the wilderness one moment, and then thoughts of her alone by the fire were pulling him to halt the next. But what he had assumed was mercy or pity or even attraction before was now so obviously something far worse, something over which he had much less control. _Instinct_. From the first moment he laid eyes on her, he had been powerless. He had given up his means, his freedom, even his body for a girl he hardly knew, and she had happily strung him along. He wouldn't forgive her for that.

But at the same time, treacherous voices tried to entrammel him with reason.

_She was an infant when those wars were fought in her name. It wasn't her fault._

_She didn't choose to be born the descendant of a goddess. Don't punish her for something she couldn't control._

_She isn't her people. She's just a girl._

_She needs you._

He fought them until he was exhausted, until he felt dead on his feet, until he found himself wandering back to the smoldering fire under a paling sky. Because of course he would end up back here. It was like she had him tethered on the end of a string.

He laid on the ground and stared over the embers at her back, temporarily defeated. Just until he got some sleep.

"I'm sorry I lied," she whispered.

He closed his eyes, drifting towards nothingness as the dew gathered on the prairie grass and his eyelashes, and fell asleep trying to decide whether or not he believed her.

Late in the morning they set off again with as little discourse as possible, and arrived at the Castletown gate near midday. No one gave him any trouble, or so much as asked who he was. Like they had all been expecting a Faronian in tow upon her triumphant return. And suddenly it made sense why the Hylian army wasn't scouring the countryside looking for their missing princess.

She led him through the grand halls of the citadel that marked the center of the world and presented him to her father, and how strange that must have looked. Nothing about him fit. Even the earthy colors marked on his body clashed with the rich dyes in the carpet and the banners. But no one seemed to mind. It was easy to put their prejudices aside when they were desperate.

They treated him like an honored guest. They spread feasts for him and lavished him with gifts that made the price he paid to free her from the slaver seem paltry. Zelda fidgeted through all of it, undoubtedly thinking the same thing he was, of what he had told her at the fork in the road leading into the Breach: that he hadn't freed her with thoughts of being repaid.

That night, slipping his knife into its holster and fastening his belt, the door to his elaborate guestroom whispered open, and all he could think was that he really should have seen this coming.

"You're leaving," she said, clicking the door shut, and he rolled his eyes.

"Don't sound surprised. You've orchestrated all of this. I'm sure you're three steps ahead of me at least."

"What do you mean?"

"What is it they keep saying? That this is all the will of the goddess?" He turned, frowning. "And that's you, right?"

She met his eyes. They didn't betray much. She just looked tired. "It doesn't work that way."

"If you say so." He moved, meeting her halfway. The room was dark except for a spill of moonlight. Her eyes caught it, glistening in a pale suggestion of that soul-renting green he knew lingered beneath. "What happens now? Are you going to tell me I can't leave?"

"No. You're free to go."

"Then what are you doing here?"

Her shoulders sagged a bit, her eyes sliding sideways and narrowing in frustration. But it wasn't snowballing towards anger the way he might've expected. She just seemed… so, _so_ tired. It made that ridiculous urge to protect her rise up in his gut. He bit it back so hard he heard his teeth grind.

"I suppose I came to say goodbye," she mused, frowning. "And to tell you that I know you'll come back for me when I need you."

He scoffed, even as he steeled himself to weather the disappointment in her eyes.

"I'm very sorry, Your Grace," he breathed, moving to brush past her. "But you've got the wrong man."

But she tangled her fingers in his before he could get away, drawing him up short. He wanted to wrench his hand away, wanted to sneer that he would never be her tool. Wanted to be defiant to the last. But it was so hard to be defiant when she was touching him like this.

"I know it's you," she whispered, too assured, too hopeful. "I saw the kindness in your heart when you freed me in Tabantha, and your selflessness and your courage when you risked your own life to get me out of the city. I saw your loyalty when you followed me in Nima, and when you followed me here, even when you knew the truth."

"You're wrong," he said, because he couldn't manage anything else.

He met her eyes, imploring her, begging her, _praying to her_ if that's what it would take, to let him go. Because if he turned to leave and she didn't, he was sure he would snap right back like a dog on a leash. She seemed to understand, her fingers slipping quietly from his. Maybe she had heard him.

"Go to the Great Hyrule Forest and see for yourself," she said, her face too dark to read in the shifting midnight. "Light a torch in the thick of the woods and follow its embers in the wind. They'll lead you to a grove where a sword lies trapped in a pedestal. That sword is the ultimate weapon. Only Hylia's Chosen One can claim it."

He turned, breathing a sigh of relief that he had scraped together the fortitude to do that much. His hand lingered on the doorknob as her voice crashed over him again like a breaking wave.

"Link. It's your destiny."

"I don't believe in destiny," he said, defiant to the last.

He was defiant as he stormed out of the castle into the welcoming night, even as his feet turned to carry him north against his judgement, against his will; defiant as he struck the flint that lit the sparks to light his way through the dense forest and as he curled his hand around a winged hilt and dredged the sacred sword out of a sheath of stone; defiant as destiny led him relentlessly back to her, as she smiled at him with that smile like the sun.

Defiant as he swore his service, his life, his _heart_ to her, always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Barbarian!Link set (4, 7, 11) will be back as a longfic! Keep an eye on my tumblr for updates.


	12. Broken Down

_Prompt No. 12  
Word count: ~3540  
Universe: Twilight Princess; prequel to "No. 17 — Dirty Secret"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Whippings, imprisonment, light poisoning_

**Broken Down**

_Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Don't be shy, now! Step right up, step right up, and see wonders and horrors from all corners of the world! Be stupefied, terrified, alacrified, and rigidified, right here at the STAR tent!_

The carnival barker's spiel was a bit repetitious if you stood and listened long enough, but his enthusiasm never tapered. The circus tent was on southwestern street, near enough to the rest of the marketplace that his booming voice carried down every alley and corridor, luring unsuspecting townspeople toting full coin purses with the promise of mystery and intrigue. It was hardly the sort of place for a respectable young woman, much less the heir apparent. But she couldn't rule the people if she didn't know the people, and she couldn't know them if she spent her entire life in a box.

But try explaining that to her widowed, aging father, whose only concern seemed to be keeping her protected and undefiled until she could produce more well-bred successors of her own.

Zelda slipped into the crowd funneling towards the circus tent, ducking a little further into her hood as she purchased her ticket. Just beyond the booth, a performer breathed a whorl of fire above her head, eliciting delighted screams from the crowd. A pair of Zora swallowed swords in mesmerizing tandem. A Sheikah shaman made shapes in smoke, sparks, and shadows. Circles of onlookers clapped and gasped and shrieked, startled and enraptured. Children begged their parents for treats, magicians charmed the unwary out of a few extra coins, and young ladies clung to their beaus as they wandered trepidatiously into the poorly lit ring of smaller tents outside the big top, huddled together beneath the looming sign that read _Freak Show_.

It wasn't until the performers began disappearing with a flourish and the flaps of the big top spread open like a menacing, toothless smile that the crush snapped out of their collective, hypnotized amazement, drawn towards the massive tent like moths to a flame. Zelda found herself shrinking away from the rush; she wasn't used to being closed in like that, and the idea of such a large group cramming into a confined space was making her feel short of breath. She turned aimlessly, wandering towards the quiet, poorly lit section beneath the looming sign.

A few stragglers came out to join the crowd as she passed under the giant letters, screaming and laughing as they held each other, still reeling from what they had seen. She kept walking, wondering why they liked to be frightened. Wondering why what was odd need be frightening at all.

The tents were arranged in a semicircle, with a slightly larger, more ominous tent at the head, presumably housing the most freakish specimen. But where the others pulsed with the warm glow of firelight, illuminating every bizarre detail of the exhibits within, the largest tent was dim, and quiet, and that was enough to draw her towards it as the crowd shrieked and crowed behind her.

She slipped into the tent. It blotted out most of the noise from outside, and was only lit by a single torch affixed to the center pole. She took a moment to breathe. It was a nice respite from all the excitement. Peaceful, even, besides the forbidding, wheeled cage on its far side.

The figure within was hunched in on itself—a shadow within a shadow. She was only there to catch her breath, and the idea of staring at something caged just to satisfy her own curiosity felt inherently distasteful. But then the creature lifted its eyes, two red orbs ensconced in the same soft gold of twilight, and she moved, breathless.

Firelight splashed quiveringly over its shape as she wandered closer. It passed over a tangled mess of golden hair, swathes of dusk and pale blue skin, and a luminescent, geometric spiral emanating from his side. She trotted closer, eyes wide, and as she did he scurried away, startling until his back was pressed to the bars. The irony wasn't lost on her: that in this house of horrors, it was she who was frightening him.

"You're Twili, aren't you?" she breathed, closing her fingers gently around the bars. His breath was quick and shallow, his bare chest pulsing like a rabbit's. She frowned; he wasn't just startled. He was terrified. She whispered, "You don't have to be afraid."

He shrunk deeper into the shadow of his cage. But his eyes, still fixed warily on her, glowed with their own light. He was neither a creature of light nor of darkness, but something in between: trapped in perpetual twilight.

"I've read about your people," she said, carefully tugging off her hood in a meager attempt to allay his fears. "But they say the mirror that was the way into your world was shattered by its ruler long ago. How did you get here?"

He didn't answer. But he seemed to shift in the darkness, just a little, to get a better look at her face in the torchlight. She tried to make herself unassuming, tilting her forehead against the bars and her profile to the fire and offering him a small smile.

"My name is Zelda," she said, and he blinked, a slow, owlish sort of blink.

He unfurled himself from the corner of the cage slowly, cautiously, taking a single, calculated step out of shadow, as though testing her. She pulled away from the bars, giving him breathing room. His glowing eyes swept the tent, scanning for danger, and then he padded over, crouching so they were nearly eye level. He was breathtaking this close. Eyes and skin and strands of hair—everything about him seemed to glow, like he was cut from ice and obsidian and gemstones. She quashed the urge to reach out and trace his skin, to see if it felt as sharp and angled as she imagined, guessing he wouldn't take kindly to that.

She asked instead, "What's your name?"

His eyes flickered up to hers and back down again, his tongue darting out to lick his lips in thought. Then he closed his fingers slowly around the bars, meeting her eyes again—boring deeply, intensely, desperately—and gave them a gentle shake. _Let me out_.

She tore her eyes away long enough to find the gate. It was wrapped shut with a thick chain and a formidable-looking padlock. She tugging it once, frowning. She needed the key.

" _Careful!_ "

All at once the peace was broken, a burly man from the circus sweeping the torch from its sconce and jamming it towards the cage as he pulled her back by the elbow. The Twili reared back against the far bars, coiled to strike and teeth bared, and loosed a taut, threatening hiss.

"You _stay back_ , Beast!" the man bellowed, and then turned to admonish the girl he had rescued. "You need to be more careful, miss. This creature is dangerous."

"He wasn't going to hurt me—" she began, but then his eyes narrowed, flickering with recognition, and she remembered who she was, and where she was, and that she couldn't be seen, ducking her head to hide her face from the light. "I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to cause trouble."

"Just be more careful," he grunted, shrugging off the strange similarities. Because a Princess of Hyrule visiting a freak show in the dead of night was a ridiculous notion indeed. "The show has nearly started, miss."

She nodded, letting herself be led away, looking back once into the darkness of the tent to meet the swirling, bloodred eyes staring after her, set in twilight gold.

The show was already beginning as she took her seat on the rickety stands. It was all more of the same that had enchanted the crowds outside: jugglers handling flaming torches and knives, sword swallowers, fire breathers, and people of all shapes and sizes performing athletic feats and magic tricks. Girls did handstands on horseback, acrobats performed on the trapeze, lions jumped through flaming hoops, and a man with an umbrella walked a highwire.

For the finale of the show, they took away half of the torches with a flourish, cutting the light, and dropped a cage over the center ring. A fearsome-looking trainer put himself inside, covered in scars and brandishing whips, and stumbling after him, hands bound and face covered, was a figure she was sure she knew.

The Twili.

"And now prepare yourselves for something truly horrifying, something _scandalizing_. A stunt so bold, so _dangerous_ , that you won't find one like it anywhere but within this very ring…"

Women shrieked as they pulled the bag off his head and cut his hands free, scrambling back outside the cage and slamming the gate closed. Children buried into their mother's breast, and men leaned forward to get a closer look.

"Watch and be amazed as our fearless hunter tames the Beast!"

Zelda gripped her seat too tightly as the hunter snapped his whip in the air just beside the Twili's face, driving him back to the edge of the cage. She wanted to put an end to it, to show herself and demand that they release him at once. But she could see how that would end: with her father locking her up tighter than he already was, and then compensating the ringmaster for his trouble and making sure his property was returned just to punish her. If she was going to help him, she would have to do so without using her royal status as leverage. So she bit her tongue and waited.

The Twili was agile and lithe, avoiding the hair-raising snaps of the hunter's whips with every curl of his body, every deft leap between the rungs as he climbed the bars of their cage, and turned when there was enough distance between them to bare his teeth and hiss again. Only now, lit by more fires and circling his opponent, could she see the half-healed stripes down his back glistening in the torchlight, see the cuts on his face and arms where he had been too slow to avoid the whips before.

Even if they had known what he was—and Zelda doubted very much that they did, since the royal family had done their best to erase any mention of the interlopers long ago—they didn't care. They treated him like an animal, and the crowd loved it. They gasped and tittered when the Twili lunged for him and was driven back, squealed with delight when the whip caught him around the ankle and dragged him back to the ground. It was barbaric, and awful. And she couldn't look away.

He look a lash to the back and to his temple before he managed to dance out of reach again, panting, and clambered up the cage wall to its tapered ceiling. He scanned the cage as the hunter stalked closer, planning his route—and met her eyes through the bars. His face changed when he spied her, morphing into something less fearsome, less _fearful_ , and she clutched at her seat like she wanted to clutch at the bars of his cage.

The whip came again, wrapping up his arm. But when the hunter pulled, he weaved himself in the bars, closed his hand on the braided leather, and pulled back. The force hoisted the hunter several feet in the air, bellowing, before his wrist slipped free of the loop and he crashed back to the arena floor. The Twili slid down after him, brandishing his newly acquired weapon, and the tent devolved into chaos. Women screamed. Children cried. Men tried to get their families to safety. And the ringmaster and his crew dove for the ring to subdue him.

He kept fighting them as the crowds looked on, mortified. Zelda couldn't help a small smile, even as they eventually overpowered him, even as they forced him to his knees, bound him, and covered his face again. She would find a way to free him before the sun came up. And once word got out that the STAR circus had nearly loosed one of its horrible beasts on the audience, the rest of them would be performing for a near-empty tent.

She let herself be ushered out with the rest of the evacuating crowd, slipping off into the shadows before she could be driven beyond the ticket booth to the street, and settled in a dark corner. Her plan was oversimplistic, perhaps, but it was formulated: find the person responsible for the keys to his cage, wait for everyone to go to sleep, and then snatch them. She just needed the opportunity to enact it.

The problem was, circus people never seemed to sleep.

She found the animal keeper slipping out the rear of the tent amidst the clamor and followed him around as he put away the horses and lions, fed them, watered them, and cleaned the stalls. He had a keyring, but there weren't many keys on it, and he never made for the circle of tents under the looming sign. The rest of the performers were busy cleaning up the stands and resetting the arena for the next show, tidying the yard, checking and polishing equipment, and then the acrobats went back to practicing for an hour or two. She had been hiding all night, and hadn't really made any progress.

The only people she hadn't seen, she realized, were the ringmaster and the Twili.

She hurried to his cage, struck with a horrible feeling in her gut. But it was empty. She clapped a hand over her mouth, swallowing a scream or something like it. She had been so fixated on finding the keys…

"Sun'll be up soon," came a voice from outside his tent, startlingly close. A splash of torchlight cast two silhouettes on the canvas, one sparking something to smoke between his teeth, and the other with his arm in a sling. "You gonna go watch the freak burn?"

"After the stunt he pulled tonight?" he growled, rolling his shoulder with a hiss. "I wouldn't miss it."

Zelda squared her shoulders and slipped out of the tent after them as they drifted towards the road. She shadowed them as they made for the square and then went east, slinking to the edge of town and then beyond, crossing the bridge and heading out into the fields. She glanced back at the castle spires, watching her condemningly from behind the city walls. She was definitely not going to make it back before she was missed. But she would deal with the consequences later.

They walked on a while—well out of earshot of the city—until they came upon a few parked circus wagons, and she sidled up behind them as the men went around to the other side. The sky was turning pale, saturating the fields with just enough light so that she could make out the scene between the wheel spokes.

The Twili had his wrists bound to a whipping post, his back dripping long, angry lines that glistened, wet and dark, against his two-toned skin. He was on his knees and hunched over, his face pressed miserably into the post, like he hoped he might slip into darkness. The ringmaster was reclined in a chair tipped onto its back legs, watching him bleed.

"Evening boys," the ringmaster said, though his eyes scanned the horizon, watching the time for such a greeting drain away. "Should be quite the sunrise."

"Come on, Beastie," the hunter said, sauntering over to pick up a water pail beside the post and hurl it into his downcast face. The Twili lurched, sputtering, as he tossed the bucket aside and then reached over to take a fistful of his hair and twist him up and around so he was facing east. "Wouldn't want you to miss it."

"After everything I've done for you," the ringmaster growled, watching the sky brighten. Watching the Twili's breath quicken as he was forced to watch the molten tip of the sun peek over the horizon. "You're ungrateful is what you are."

The first glorious rays of the sun spilled over the hillside, casting light and shadow over Zelda's hiding place. But she couldn't move to get more cover. She could hardly breathe. Because everywhere the sun touched him he _glowed_ , his skin reacting to the light, and he whimpered, his face screwed with pain.

"I should throw him back in the dunes where I found him."

"I'd _love_ to see what the desert sun would do to you, Beastie."

"He wouldn't last five minutes. Bet he'd shrivel up like a grape."

"You think so? Wouldn't he just light up like tinder?"

The orb climbed higher, a burning semicircle kissing the ground with heat. The dusk of his skin was turning ashen, miserable, half-swallowed cries sounding deep in his throat as it climbed. The shadows gave way as the sun rose in earnest, a perfect ring hanging low in the morning sky, and he let his head fall back and screamed. His body smoldered like an ember, sizzling and steaming as the sun burned him alive. And just as Zelda, horrified tears streaming down her face, made to burst out of her hiding place, the ringmaster stood.

"He's had enough," he sighed, and the other two cut him loose and tossed a cloak over his head, blinding him and concealing him at once.

They dragged him to the back of the wagon Zelda hid behind, throwing him under the canvas and swinging the cage door shut with a clang, and she slid under, ducking between the wheels, watching their feet as they rounded the wagon and climbed into the driver's seat. Her eyes snagged on the keyring hanging from the ringmaster's belt.

"How many times are we going to have to do this song and dance?"

"Maybe he's too stupid a beast."

"He's not stupid. He's stubborn," the ringmaster breathed, gathering up the reins. "I'll break him yet."

He urged the horse on, and Zelda laid perfectly still as the wagon pulled away, exposing her to the early light. But they didn't look back. She got to her knees as they rocked out of view, and then to her feet, wiping tears from her face as she ducked her head and followed.

Castletown was stirring to life as she wandered back through the streets, shops opening yawningly and guards quietly rotating out. The call hadn't gone out from the castle yet that she was missing, so a cloaked, lonely figure meandering across the square and down to southwestern street drew no one's attention. And as the rest of the world eased awake, the circus finally drifted towards somber, desolate sleep. Even the big top seemed less grand in the morning, its colors more dull in the sun than they had been in the firelight and the tentcloths seeming to sag. The circus wagon was already emptied, parked haphazardly near the _Freak Show_ sign.

Zelda spied the ringmaster. He seemed different in the sunlight, too: fatter, older. Like his wanton cruelty that morning had aged him prematurely. He trudged through the backstage area toward the tents where most of the other performers had already crashed to doze away the morning. He hung his keyring on a post jutting up between the big top and the animal cages and dragged himself toward the tents.

She didn't follow to make sure he went to bed. She just snatched the keys and ran.

She was breathless and trembling by the time she made it back to the Twili's tent. He was still glowing, his body rippling with dusty, mist-colored radiance. The only darkness left on him was the bloodstains on his back. She crossed the tent and gripped the padlock, unfurling the ring of keys, and pressed the first toothy shape into the keyhole. When she tugged, it wouldn't budge, and she gingerly moved on to the next.

Seven keys later, the lock slipped open.

She lowered the gate slowly, quietly, wary of disturbing the sleepy quiet of the circus with the groan of the cage hinges. But when she climbed inside and reached to touch him he lurched away, half-delirious, and hit the bars so hard the cage rattled like a gong.

"It's me," she quavered, desperate to keep him quiet, wrenching back her hood so he could see her face. "It's only me."

His eyes darted to the open gate before they finally found hers, drawing sluggishly into focus. He was harried and pitiful, tears streaming down his face and trembling all over like a rabbit. He sagged when he recognized her, head bowing and crimson eyes closing in exhaustion. Neither of them moved. They just sat on their knees a while, listening to the dull patter of the teardrops slipping from his chin to drum on the wooden floorboards. It was like listening to rain fall off an awning: too slow, and too loud, drowning out the storm behind it.

Her hand found his mouth, his jaw, the cradle of his neck, moving so gradually neither of them seemed to be aware of it. He wasn't sharp at all. He was soft and perfect. But then he was leaning into it, into her, and when she drew him closer he collapsed into her arms, like he didn't have the strength left to resist even the smallest drop of kindness. And as she held him to her breast, she thought maybe the ringmaster had been right.

Maybe he had broken him.


	13. Breathe In Breathe Out

_Prompt No. 13  
_ _Word count: ~930  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Character death, blood loss, fatal injuries_

**Breathe In Breathe Out**

Blatchery Plains is a sea of fire and lights, crippled guardians spewing sparks and smoke foundering in the chaos like so many shipwrecks run aground. The sky pulses red and murky and thick in time with his heartbeat. Red, like the beam of a guardian's laser about to shred through his body again. Like the blood spilling out of him that he has long since given up trying to stem.

_Breathe in._

His lungs fill with embers and smoke as her fingers alight on his shoulders. He's on one knee, brought low by enemies that just won't stop coming, by the holes in his body where he ripped shrapnel from himself or where a guardian's beam ran him through, and he leans on his sword sunk into the ground so he won't fall farther. Her touch is too soft, too insubstantial, like she's fading away, or he is.

_Breathe out._

She begs him to save himself, tells him to run. He doesn't have the energy to laugh at her. He could more easily rip his own heart out of his chest, leave it sputtering on the battlefield, and walk away than he could bring himself leave her. Running would be pointless, anyway.

He knows he's already dead. He can feel it.

He can feel it in the way his vision crowds darker the longer he tries to stand, in the way his heart pounds so hard he thinks it might burst and leaves him feeling weak and wasted when he bleeds out. He doesn't fixate on it. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters, except for her.

He can feel the tremors in the earth, vibrating up his sword and through his arm, and he knows they're about to be discovered. He knows more of them are coming.

_Breathe in._

He heaves himself to his feet, swallowing a cry as every charred nerve and fractured bone screams in protest, and stumbles back. He almost has to plunge the sword down again to keep from falling over. But he finds his footing somehow, manages to square his good shoulder forward and keep the tip of his blade airborne in spite of the way lifting it sends pain shooting up behind his eyes. His other arm is crushed beyond use. He thinks his spine might be, too.

It's a little difficult not to dwell on the absurdity of his being able to stand at all.

A guardian crests the boulder that had shielded them from the other sentries and fixes them in its sights, advancing with heavy, frantic, skittering steps. It's tainted a lambent, cloying pink, so bright and so close he can smell the malice. His vision constricts and dances in triplicate, so he's not sure if he's facing one guardian or three. It tramples the smoking hulls of the machines that had come before it, planting its massive claws like anchors as it rears up and charges the firing mechanism. The beam is red and narrow, whirring and climbing in cadence as it sears into his head.

_Breathe out._

He's too broken to mount an offense. So he holds his ground. He puts himself between the Calamity and the princess, making his body her shield. The light is blinding, but he stares it down. _That's right. Keep your sights on me._ He can't see her at his back, but he can feel her, giving him the strength to will himself alive when his body should've given out long ago. But she isn't running, and that alone makes him want to double over and empty his stomach in the grass, because in a matter of seconds she's going to be alone with that thing, and there will be nothing he can do to protect her then.

And then she's in front of him, screaming, pushing him away, facing the guardian in his stead, and she's _glowing_.

_Breathe in._

Divine power is ebbing off her in waves. She's radiant. She's _breathtaking_. For a single, suspended moment, the light swells brighter, and then it's bursting out of her and engulfing the field. It's warm and soft as it floods over him, purging the malice from everything it touches. It must be what being touched by a goddess feels like.

He can't take his eyes off her, hypnotized as the light casts her in full silhouette. She's fearless, and powerful, and untouchable. She's every bit the goddess she was always meant to be. And he can't help but think she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

When the light fades the guardian trembles, and then the corruption is leaving it with a ghostly scream. Malice is lifting in plumes of smoke all across Blatchery Plain like so many spirits ascending. The machines deactivate and collapse. And he feels a bizarre mingling of peace and horror—as the world flickers out, as he feels himself falling—as he realizes she doesn't need him anymore.

Then she's holding him, and her voice is sweet, and perfect, and sounding much too far away. He finds her eyes as he labors through the last of it, trying to take in as much of her as he can as the dark crowds around her. Using the last ounces of strength he has left to keep his eyes open, to keep them focused. Because he wants her to be the last thing he sees.

He takes solace in the fact that she's safe. In the fact that he fought long enough to see her come into her power.

In the fact that he protected her right down to his dying breath.

_Breathe out._


	14. Fire

_Prompt No. 14  
_ _Word count: ~1780  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 9 — Ritual Sacrifice"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Fever, pair bonding_

**Fire**

She couldn't sleep. It was the dead of night, and the dragon was still roaring. When the sun had begun to set, she had her wits about her enough to scour the cave for anything useful before it was too dark to see. She found a few things, presumably his, that she gathered up and brought closer—a cooking pot, a cup, a few bundles of herbs, a small knife. She had ventured to the mouth of the cave and stuffed the cooking pot with snow before setting it beside him, letting his heat melt it into drinking water.

It had been hours and he hadn't improved. She honestly hadn't known what to expect—after the spring rite, when she had been chosen, the elders could tell her very little about what would happen once she was taken except that she wouldn't be seen again—but she got the distinct impression this wasn't normal. He was in too much pain to function, and she was barefoot and barely dressed. She wouldn't survive long outside the protection of the cave and his heat. Unless he made a miraculous recovery, starvation was a real possibility.

She had to help him. Not that she was particularly thrilled with the idea, but he was her best chance of survival. Even if he had started off their relationship by snatching her off a frozen altar and then carrying her across the world with depraved intentions.

Another stream of fire erupted from his mouth, which had been happening fairly regularly—whenever the emberglow in his chest pulsed too bright. Fortunately, he always angled its trajectory towards the ceiling, though it was hard to say if that was a coincidence or something he did for her benefit. He hardly seemed to know she was there anymore. Still, it would be a while before he breathed fire again, so now was her chance.

She gingerly padded behind him in her bare feet, and then knelt and lifted his head onto her lap. She dipped the cup into the pot and brought the water to his mouth, cradling him so it would be easier to drink. He leaned for it when it touched his lips, lifting a trembling hand over hers to keep it close. He let his head fall back after he had downed it, panting, and she brushed his matted bangs away from his forehead.

"Can you drink another?" she asked, and he managed a weak nod.

She couldn't help but marvel at his warmth as she helped him with a second cupful, radiating from his head on her lap to heat her right down to her toes. If there was any doubt he was what he was, that was evidence enough—though his Hylian form was very convincing, handsome even, with firm features, a tangle of sun-bleached hair, and, in the brief moments she had spied them, startlingly blue eyes.

"Thank you," he said, hoarse and breathless, after he had emptied it again.

"More?"

"No," he whispered, swallowing, and turned his face into her skirt.

Her brow furrowed as she watched him—the sudden, relieved sag of his shoulders, the deep, full breaths he drew, his electrifying, peaceful silence. She threaded her fingers at his temple, stroking his hair from his face, and he sighed, his breath washing through the fabric of her skirt to warm her knees. The knowledge that she could soothe him so easily made something strange and frightening stir in her chest.

"Do you have a name?"

That was a strange way to phrase the question. Who didn't have a name? Maybe dragons didn't, she thought idly, and raked her nails softly across his scalp when he trembled, his throat bobbing in discomfort, coaxing him through it.

"I'm Zelda," she said.

He nodded, turning his face even deeper into her leg.

"It's a good name," he whispered.

"Are you…" Her mouth tugged towards a frown. But there was really no way to be delicate about it, was there? "Are you sick? Are you dying?"

"I don't know. I've never felt like this before."

The biting Hebra winds howled outside the cave and she held onto him a little tighter. Her thoughts were running everywhere, imagining one horrific scenario after another. Maybe he was already at death's door, and she would be trapped and alone on that mountain within the hour. Maybe he would weaken until he was mad from hunger and turn on her in his dragon shape, cleaving her in two with his massive jaws before gulping her down. Maybe she could beat him to it, plunge his knife into his chest and steal his boots and his tunic and take her chances with the mountain.

She must have been overtired.

She set her lips into a line, leaning a little closer so the heat from him warmed her face.

"At the risk of sounding selfish, I need you alive," she murmured. "I won't last long up here without you."

"I know." He swallowed again thickly. "It's the song."

"What song?"

He met her eyes, his gaze so strikingly blue that it seemed to glow. He whispered, "Yours."

She frowned, bemused, but his attention was already moving elsewhere. The emberglow pulsed in his breast, like a jewel strung on a chain beneath his tunic. But it wasn't bright enough to worry her yet.

"I'm sorry about before. I don't know what…" His eyes pinched closed, like talking about their first encounter made him hurt worse, and rolled onto his shoulder with a groan. "I need to get you off this mountain."

He moved away from her in the dark, and then the cavern was warmer, _darker_ , and she knew he had changed. He pushed his snout into her hands, slipping slowly past to encourage her to feel up his neck, to his shoulder, and then stopped in apparent invitation. Smooth, hot scales gave way to the leathery hilt of his wing just behind his shoulder, and she braced herself, one hand curled around his pinions and the other on his withers, and hoisted herself onto his back.

His spine twisted beneath her with the first, great step of his gait, and she sunk to her belly, both for an easier ride and for the heat. His shoulder muscles flexed and stretched as they stepped out of the cave onto the mountainside, his massive wings unfurling part way to protect her from the buffeting winds. It was too dark to see them, but she could make out their shape where they were blotting out the stars and the iceglow, hear the wind whistle and moan where it slipped along leathery seams. And once in a great while, the ember near his heart would burn too hot, and he would turn his head down into the mountain and breathe a whorl of fire that was eaten by the snow.

Nestled safely between his pinions, his rocking steps turning familiar, she rolled onto her back to watch the aurora borealis glimmer and ripple across the midnight sky, and eventually nodded off.

The sun rose as they rounded the East Summit.

She slipped higher up his neck to watch, shivering as she sacrificed some of his heat for the view. It was a clear morning, the ice crystals in the snow lit up in a glittering spectacle as the sunbeams breached the horizon, and the surrounding peaks casting massive, forbidding shadows. She had never seen a sunrise like it. She imagined few ever had.

With the light setting the dragon's inky scales aflame, they began their descent. It was hardly smooth—more than once, huge snowdrifts gave out beneath them, carrying them too suddenly down to the next outcropping—but besides the sensation of her stomach flying into her throat, she was no worse for wear. The last bit of slope before they reached the south Snowfield gave way, and he changed, his body slipping out of its dragon shape as they slid into the valley so she landed in the snow with a squeak.

He was on his knees, arms around his middle and hair tangled every which way by the Tabantha winds, and for the first time it occurred to her that his condition might have been worsening all that time. She slid closer, urging him into the shelter of a few evergreens, and propped him up against one of the scabrous trunks. He steamed in the sun.

"Follow the road south," he told her, panting. "There's a village not far from here. They'll help you."

"What about you?"

His brow furrowed, like that was the strangest question he'd ever heard. Then he tugged her closer, turning his face into the hollow of her throat, and exhaled a long, penetrating breath into her skin, warming her from head to toe. Even when the wind blew again, she hardly felt the cold. He let his head fall back against the tree.

"Go home, Zelda." He smiled weakly, a wry, scheming smile. "Tell your people their offering displeased me greatly, and if they do it again, I'll burn down a village."

Another gust tugged and pulled at them, willing them apart. But something kept her rooted. Something in the wind that sounded like a song.

"Did I?" she asked, breathless, and his smile faded.

"No," he whispered, reaching to touch her mouth with a trembling hand. "You were perfect."

She looked back towards the road, winding down towards a village and the way home, back to…

...back to what? A chance at a normal life? She had never found that notion particularly appealing. She had always longed for something more—for adventure, or magic, or at the very least something more than the pastoral confines of Necluda province. Offered up as a ritual sacrifice to a dragon wouldn't necessarily have been her first choice, but now that it had happened, and she was here… the whole arrangement didn't seem as awful as one might have imagined.

And he wouldn't survive this fever much longer. Leaving him here meant leaving him to die.

So she did the only thing that made any sense to her in that dizzy, directionless moment. She scraped together her courage, watching the way his brow knitted when she lingered, and then shut her eyes before she could change her mind and kissed him. She was slow and inexperienced and not entirely sure what she was doing. But he didn't need much more encouragement than that.

He pulled her into his lap, suddenly renewed, eagerly meeting her clumsy advances and then outpacing her, chasing her mouth as her fingers knotted in his hair. She melted further into his possessive hold, into the surprisingly pleasant heat of his tongue, into the sweet song climbing in her mind until she soared.

"Just don't burn me," she sighed against his mouth, breathless, and the fire in his eyes outshone the sun.

"Never."


	15. Science Gone Wrong

_Prompt No. 15  
_ _Word count: ~1530  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 6 — 'Stop, please'"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Experimentation/test subject, torture_

**Science Gone Wrong**

Link dragged himself to his bed and collapsed on it, exhausted. When he finally woke again, the world outside the window was dark, and Zelda was scribbling notes at her table. There was a bowl of stew on the floor beside his cot that looked suspiciously normal. He stared from across the room, watching her slight frown flicker in the firelight. She never looked up.

He shifted a little, testing his body. He still felt like he'd been hit in the chest by a boulder.

"What in Hylia's name did you do to me?" he finally growled, trying to ignore the startling weakness he felt in every muscle as he rolled onto his side, the way his hands shook as he scooped the bowl off the floor.

She sighed. "I don't know."

He took a bite. Meat, potatoes, carrots, wild onions. It was just food. He would almost rather it had been an experiment. He murmured, "I was certain you were going to kill me."

"I promised I wouldn't," she said, finally looking up to scowl at him.

They glared at each other for a while, waiting at opposite ends of something impassible for the other to make a move. And then she did the unthinkable and looked away first. He nearly dropped his spoon for shock. He studied her a moment longer, processing.

He finally decided, "It frightens you."

She frowned deeper, scribbled a little faster. "I don't like anything I can't explain."

He looked down at his bowl, pushed around some chunks of meat and vegetables. Ate a little of it.

"Did it help?"

"Did what help?"

"The experiment. Did you learn anything?"

She twirled her quill, thinking, and then thought so hard she forgot to twirl it. "Maybe. I don't know."

He bit into a potato, chewing and swallowing and trying to enjoy the normalness of it. But he couldn't shake the feeling that it symbolized something unpleasant, that it was a symbol of some kind of change.

"That's quite the burden," he finally murmured, and she glanced at him, her frown morphing into something less heated, something that almost resembled a smile, but that was no less somber.

"Why do you think I live in the remotest place on earth?"

There was nothing he could say to that. He went back to his bowl, and she to her book. When he finished, he set his dirty dish on the floor and rolled over again on his cot, still aching and exhausted. He watched her out of one eye, buried in his pillow. In spite of everything she had done to him, he didn't hate her quite as much as he should have. The feeling welling up in him now, watching her pore over her data, wasn't close to hate at all. It felt suspiciously like pity.

He murmured, as he brain began to cloud in earnest, "Sometimes I don't know what to think of you."

And then he was gone.

She didn't run a single experiment on him the next day. She came and went, gathering herbs and mushrooms and harvesting monster parts, taking the little egg with her. But he was too tired to think of escape. Not while there was a storm brewing on the horizon, anyway.

Maybe tomorrow.

He fell asleep that night before sunset, before Zelda had come home. When he woke, it was to the little egg, buzzing and whirring, poking him all over with its claws.

"Go away," he murmured, still half asleep.

It only clamped onto the cot and shook it, nearly bouncing him to the floor.

"Hey! What's the matter with you?" he swatted at him. "Zelda, tell your soft boiled little—"

But she was nowhere to be seen. The little egg beeped and whined, its eye pulsing too bright and its legs fidgeting and squirming. He'd never seen it so antsy. He looked out the window, black with night and shuddering with the blizzard outside. She must have been in trouble.

Link growled at his own, stupid decency, swiping a handful of elixirs, and followed the squealing egg out into the storm.

Between the buffeting winds and the ice pelting his face, he was all but blind. But the guardian was a beacon, always just a step ahead, its pulsating blue eye lighting up the blizzard like a portable moonbeam. The mountain was heaped with fresh snow and treacherous, always trying to blow him off a cliff or suck him into a crevasse. But he tucked his hands into his arms, shivering, and kept on. The elixir staved off frostbite, but a blizzard in Hebra was cold no matter who you were or what potions you'd taken. As much as he hated to admit it, he was worried. He wouldn't put it past the mountain to end her, even if she could get struck by lightning and live.

Finally, the moon led him to the sun.

The blizzard around her churned and whipped, drawn by her and repelled at once. She undulated with molten light, rippling out of her like tendrils of smoke. She was on her knees, arms closed on herself as she withstood the storm under nothing but her own power. The little egg screamed towards her, tiny legs whirring, and she turned. Light leaked from the corners of her eyes like tears.

"I told you to go home!" she shouted, but the guardian only bounced and swiveled, shining its moonbeam on Link as he stumbled after it, and she sagged. "You shouldn't be here."

"Yeah, I know," he panted, stopping just out of arm's reach. "The egg was worried about you."

Her jaw clenched and her head bowed. The wind had wrested her hair out of its pins, tangling it everywhere. And in spite of everything, in spite of the unholy light seeping out of her body and the way the storm seemed drawn to her like a magnet, he thought he had never seen her looking so small. Light dropped from her downcast face into the snow.

"I can't make it stop," she finally admitted, her voice quavering as she raised it over the storm. "A lizalfos ambushed me and I just—I killed it. But now I can't—"

She swallowed down the rest, trembling, and he cautiously moved closer. Her fingertips looked too stiff to bend.

"You can figure this out," he coaxed her. "You're the scientist. Just tell me what you need me to do."

She looked up at him again, and her expression was defeated. He hated it. She whispered, her words nearly eaten by the wind, "This isn't science."

"Anything that can be observed and measured is science."

"I don't know how to measure this."

He licked chapped, dry lips, watching her crackle with light, and knelt in the snow. He was fairly confident this was a terrible idea, and if there had been any lingering effects from the hearty meal she had made him, the spicy elixir he had downed had certainly canceled them out. But she was too frightened of herself to be coerced into coming home, he couldn't stand the thought of leaving her.

He said, "Maybe we just need to run an experiment on you."

And then he touched her, reaching with both hands to hold her shoulders. It was nothing like the experiment she had run on him, when she had pressed her palm to his chest and crushed his heart while it was still beating. It was worse.

Lightning tore through him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, bursting every blood vessel as it went and blowing his heart open. His lungs shattered. His bones bent back the wrong way like fingernails. His skin melted off. He was already dead. He could feel it. It was just a few borrowed moments, lent to him so he could scream, so he could feel the gruesome sensation of his heart still beating even though it had nearly turned inside out.

He could feel her, too. He could feel her icy fingers on his neck, feel her face burrowed in his throat, feel her glowing, chilly tears slipping down his collar. Feel her gasping and sobbing between his hands as he roared in agony. Feel her lips on his skin, whispering brokenly. _Please, Hyila, please_.

Then the light snapped out, and all at once he was whole.

He collapsed into her, gasping, boneless, his vision spotting in the sudden dark. They buried in each other, covered in the snow, grasping at cloth and hair and the promise of warmth. He fumbled weakly in his pocket, offering her a vial in his shaking hand before burrowing his eyes back into the curve of her neck, still out of breath.

"Let's not do this again," he panted hoarsely, his throat too sore for words, and she threaded her fingers through his hair, held him closer as he sagged.

"Idiot," she breathed.

"Witch."

The egg whirred between them, poking and prodding and lifting until they were stumbling back up the mountain, and its moonbeam eye lit the way as they dragged each other, slowly, clumsily, haltingly, back to the house.


	16. Forced to Beg

_Prompt No. 16  
_ _Word count: ~1040  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Torture, impalement, malice, character death_

**Forced to Beg**

Everything had gone wrong.

No sooner had they stepped through the castle gates than the ancient columns had burst from the earth, flooding Castletown with corrupted guardians, and the Divine Beasts, poised to attack on the fringes of Hyrule, bloomed with the sickly pink of Ganon's malice. He had grabbed her hand to flee, recognizing that the tide of battle had turned irretrievably in the Calamity's favor.

But he hadn't been fast enough.

There was malice coiled up his arms, around his legs. In his mouth, down his throat. It was growing across his face, burning out one of his eyes. It had coated so deep that he couldn't scream when it lanced him through the back and came out at his shoulder, dragging him up off his knees. When his vision started to white it withdrew, and he sputtered and gagged, expelling black and pink from his nose and mouth.

The miasma started to part, webbing and sinew stretching and bubbling, and the spear in his shoulder pushed deeper, hoisting and dragging as it pulled a roar from behind his teeth. He tried to lift his head as his body came to rest, tried to peer out of his good eye, bloodied and swollen though it was. Two glistening green pools stared back, ringed red and hopeless. But he knew it was no gift. It was more punishment.

She was safe for the moment, imprisoned in a cocoon of malice from where she could watch the world burn. The Divine Beasts leveled villages, and guardians marched to dismantle the kingdom's last defenses. The monarchy was ended and the champions murdered at their posts. All that was left of her rebellion was him.

The malice entombing his crushed hands pulled his limbs apart, spreading him so his broken body was on display for her, and another spear grew from the mire and pressed beneath his chin. He held her gaze, even as the tip dug deeper, threatening to plunge through him. He didn't want her to see him like this. But if it had to be, then he wanted her to remember this moment for his resolve, and not for his disfigurement.

The Calamity had no body for his blade to cut, and seemed to have little by way of a mind. But it had hate enough that it burned, that it consumed, that he knew it was no coincidence that he was still alive. Hate enough that it hardly surprised him when that hate could conjure a word, a thought, a voice, that resonated within and without.

 _Beg_.

She blinked into the strange vacuum that followed, her expression going neutral as she wondered at the sound, at the source, at the word. At the order. Her lips parted, her eyes going wide and glassy again, betraying her panic, betraying the sudden shift as her tormentor presented her with yet another mission, yet another task in which her failure would mean pain and suffering for someone else.

Link wanted to shout. He wanted to beg her not to do it. He wanted to tell her to let the monster do with him what it would so he wouldn't have to watch her torture herself for him. But he couldn't make a sound. It was all he could do to keep breathing. He coughed malice over his lip.

"Please let him live," she quavered, her voice impossibly tiny in that massive, throbbing tomb. She was crying—of course she was, she had _been_ crying—but it was suddenly frantic, a detached, panicked trickle that she hardly seemed aware of and that she didn't have the energy to stem. "Please. I'll do anything. Just spare his life."

 _Beg_.

She did. Louder. More desperately. Fueled by a more familiar kind of terror.

"Please, I beg of you! I'll do anything you ask. Just please have mercy on him, _please_!"

It made the demand again, and again, and again, and she tried over and over to satisfy it, louder and louder until she was screaming, until her hands were claws over her ears and her voice was shrill and burning and unintelligible. He wanted to scream with her. He wanted to cover her ears for her, whisper between his bleeding fingers that she didn't have to listen. Bitter tears streamed out of his good eye.

He had never felt so useless.

The spear pressed deeper, drawing blood, and suddenly everything changed. The tomb resonated with the sharp hum of a struck bell, vibrating down to his bones, and the malice constricted like a writhing muscle. The darkness bleached and withered, and the rosy pulse of the beast leached into the air.

She was glowing.

The light pouring out of her was blinding and divine, pressuring the walls around it until they tore, until the malice was shredding apart against the force of it and retreating like an injured animal. The spear beneath his chin shriveled, and the lance in his shoulder and the masses on his arms and legs melted.

And then, in an act of pure spite, what malice was left congealed to a tip, whipped forward, and stabbed him through the back.

Zelda caught him as he fell, screaming again. Her voice was hoarse and cracking. She curled up over him on the floor of the ruined Sanctum, cradling his head while he coughed spatters on her prayer dress. The monster still roared, circling the castle spire like some kind of spectral vulture. He wanted to tell her to go. She needed to be driving it back, not wasting energy _mourning him_. And he was blessed, anyway; didn't she know that? Didn't she know that seeing her finally step into her powers was more than enough?

He had never been much for words. And now that he desperately, desperately wanted them, they wouldn't come.

"Please don't go, Link, _please_ ," she hissed, clinging to him, crying tears of light. And with a twist of his stomach, he realized she was begging him the same way she had begged the Calamity. "Please, don't. Please."

What he wouldn't have given to be able to oblige her.

But it just wasn't meant to be.


	17. Dirty Secret

_Prompt No. 17  
_ _Word count: ~1790  
Universe: Twilight Princess; sequel to "No. 12 — Broken Down"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Illness, lethargy, recovery_

**Dirty Secret**

Getting the Twili out of town was a nightmare.

He was too weak to walk on his own, and the sun was rising higher by the minute. She snatched the cloak from the circus wagon and threw it over his shoulders, and found a pair of boots to cover his feet, and then ducked under his arm to help him lumber down the street. She looked like she was carting a sack of grain to the gate. She half expected an alarm to sound any second from the circus tent, calling for the guards to hunt down a beast, or from the castle, calling for the guards to hunt down a princess. But by some miracle they made it into Hyrule Field without incident.

But light is a difficult thing to avoid, and everywhere the sun slipped beneath his hood or grazed his ankle when a step would pull his pant leg over the top of his pilfered boot it would burn, and he would hiss and gasp and flinch, and there was nothing she could do but murmur soft apologies and keep heading for the treeline.

The little smattering of forest that sprouted up behind the south road was not the ideal hideaway—and it would probably be exactly the sort of place the ringmaster would look, once he began his inevitable search—but it would have to do. They moved through the mottled shade, slipping painstakingly around the pockets of sunlight, until they happened across a pile of boulders, all covered in moss and lichen and leaning haphazardly on one another. The hollow between them made a sort of cave; not as hidden as she would've liked, but it was dark, and secluded, and her legs were much too wobbly to find someplace else.

He all but collapsed as she eased herself out from under his arm, his hood slipping off as he sagged against the cavern wall, panting. He was still glowing, all misty and moon-colored; under different circumstances she might have called it beautiful, but it was hard to think it anything but ugly when it so obviously caused him pain. She wanted to flop down beside him and rest, but she didn't have time to waste. The guards were probably already scouring the city for her, and he was in no condition to be left on his own for very long.

"Stay here," she murmured, looking for his eyes, trying to coerce them open with soft fingertips in his hairline. It didn't work. "I'll be back soon."

She scurried back to town, pulling her hood tight over her head. She stayed near the fringes of the market, buying enough spring water to last a few days, and some bread, and a little dried meat and a few apples. Castle guards appeared at the mouth of the street as the rupees exchanged hands. She stuffed her supplies into a tote from the shopkeeper and hurried back to the rock pile in the woods.

He had dragged himself to the back of the cave in her absence and curled up on the floor. It would've been dark enough that he would have been hard to spot, except for the fact that everywhere he wasn't covered he was still casting off light. She slipped back after him, wedging herself between jutting stone, and set the satchel down nearby.

"Hey," she whispered, frowning at the miserable-looking shape of the cloak draped over his hunched body. She didn't understand his condition at all, but it didn't seem to be improving in the slightest. "I brought water. Can you drink?"

He opened a golden-red eye to stare at her, still breathing too hard, but didn't move. She knelt beside him, pulling the tote closer, and produced a bottle of spring water, hoping the visual would entice him. But it was no use. His gaze slid lazily to the glass and then disappeared again.

"Please. You need to try."

She slipped the bottle into his hand and closed his fingers around it, and then sighed, moving to peel off his cloak. It stuck and pulled at his back, his eyes twitching in discomfort, but he didn't complain. She really didn't know the first thing about field medicine. But they would have to make do. She shifted out of her cloak, ripping off strips and squares of cloth. She cleaned the wounds as best she knew how and tried to bandage them. It wasn't very impressive looking when she was through.

She cupped his cheek, turning his luminous face towards her again, looking for his eyes.

"I don't know how to help you," she whispered, frowning. "You have to tell me what to do."

He didn't have answers for her. His eyes closed again, his head drooping against her palm. She sighed, praying to Nayru that she hadn't inadvertently traded his life imprisonment for a death sentence.

"I need to go," she said, draping his cloak over him and folding what remained of hers under his head. "I'll be back as soon as I can. I promise."

She only hoped that was a promise she would be able to keep.

Predictably, she was pounced on as soon as she crossed back into Castletown, and her father was livid. But concern for the Twili helped her keep her head down, helped her swallow her pride and accept his chastisement without temper. And perhaps it was that rare display of humility that lessened his wrath. After ranting for twenty minutes or so without so much as an answering eye roll for it, he dismissed her without much sanction.

It felt a bit surreal to have had such a bizarre adventure and come away with a mere slap on the wrist. Now all that remained was to make it through the day without falling over for exhaustion.

After nearly nodding off during lunch, she was able to slip away under the guise of a light headache to sneak in a nap before she was scheduled to meet with the last of her tutors. She slept facedown so as not to muss her hair, and even then her ladies fretted over repinning the front and powdering away the red mark where her forehead had rested on her arm.

That night, she forced herself to wait a few hours after she retired to her room before making any attempt to leave. She sat up in bed with a book, eyes scanning the same page over and over as she wondered about the boy in the cave. Had he fled as soon as night had fallen? Or was he still too ill to escape? Or worse, had their mistreatment killed him in her absence? Had the ringmaster found him and dragged him back to the circus tent to punish him further?

She clapped the book shut with a huff and slipped out from under the covers, donning her spare commoner's outfit that she had paid one of the grooms for quite handsomely—a plain tunic and trousers; if only her father could see her now—and tiptoed her way out of her very familiar, very poorly sentineled palace.

She made it through the sleepy town square and the bedarkened market with its empty stalls without incident, holding her breath as she approached the gates. But the guards were inattentive as ever, gambling away their pay out of boredom. The fields were wide open and welcoming, spattered with just enough moonlight to navigate without too much stumbling.

Zelda took the south road to the woods, following a trail of familiar trees, and ducked into the narrow mouth of the cave. The Twili was a washed-out glimmer against the shadows in the darkest corner of the cavern, sparkling amidst the night like some strange, overgrown fairy. He was sitting upright, which she hoped was a sign he was on the mend. Or maybe he was just sick of lying facedown on the cold ground.

One of the water bottles was emptied, and a loaf torn into. He was barefoot and bare chested again, the stolen boots tucked neatly against the wall and his cloak folded tidily on top of them. His head was tipped back against the stone, his breathing still much too labored and his brow creased with discomfort. She padded up to him, kneeling, and felt after his temperature with the back of her hand—first at his throat, then his cheek, then his forehead. He felt exceptionally warm. But for all she knew, that was normal for him. His eyes peeled open, resting on her face, taking her in beyond mere recognition, before they closed again.

"I wish I knew how to help you," she sighed, frowning again as she brushed his bangs aside. "I wish I knew what I was doing. I wish I knew your name."

He didn't stir. She checked the tote. He hadn't touched the meat or the apples, and he still had plenty of water. Did he need blankets? Hot broth? Medicine? Maybe there was nothing to be done. Maybe he just needed rest.

But then he shifted, wincing, and took a breath, and when he spoke his voice was strange and cavernous, reverberating out of his mouth as though it came from someplace far away.

"Link," he panted, and then took a breath to try again, the corner of his mouth lifting as he spied her perplexed expression. "That's my name."

She all but plopped beside him, a little stunned. His eyes were already closed again; he was either too exhausted or in too much pain to keep them open. If she was honest, she wouldn't have minded closing her eyes for a while, too. She hadn't had decent sleep in longer than she cared to admit.

"What do you need?" she whispered, praying she could squeeze at least that much out of him before he lapsed back into silence.

It took him a while to answer, like he had to scrape together the energy.

"Time," he said.

She smiled softly, feeling the faintest flutter of hope. She stayed with him for an hour more—or perhaps longer; she did close her eyes once and startle awake, and couldn't figure out if she had slept for two minutes or two hours—and then slipped away when she feared she might be missed. By some miracle, she managed to make it back to the castle in her haggard state without being seen, and slept in as late as she dared.

She snuck out to visit him again the next night, and though he still glowed, he didn't seem quite so bright. She visited him again the night after, and the night after that, monitoring his improving condition and bringing him supplies.

And so it was that Princess Zelda had a secret.


	18. Paranoia

_Prompt No. 18  
_ _Word count: ~2040  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; prequel to "No. 21 — Infection"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Manipulation, haunting, unhealthy relationships_

**Paranoia**

Zelda went to the Temple of Time to sit beside her mother's grave. There was a common misconception that members of the royal family were all buried beneath the two elaborate headstones that flanked the goddess statue in the nave, but that wasn't true. There was a secluded graveyard behind the building with a private entrance just beyond the shrine, and that was where her mother was laid to rest, her name engraved in a simple white marker.

She didn't usually indulge in wiling hours away at her mother's side, speaking into the air; but things at home recently had been… difficult. And trying to talk to her father about it was more an exercise in futility than anything. Not that he didn't care. He cared. He just didn't understand. So there she was, well past sunset, lingering with her feet folded under her in the grass, wracking her brain for details to share so she could convince herself she had a reason to stay.

"Did I tell you about Demetri?" she asked, though she was sure she already had. Twice at least. "Father gave him leave to visit again in the spring. But he was horrible. _Horrible_. And so incredibly arrogant! You'd think he was king already." She sighed, leaning her shoulder into the gravestone, and whispered, "I wish you were here."

And then a light flickered out of the corner of her eye, and when she followed it she found a man standing not six feet away. He looked thoughtful, his arms crossed over his chest, and a strange looking lantern dangled from his fingers. She sat bolt upright, heart hammering, and glared.

"How long have you been standing there?" she demanded, and he blinked once, slowly, like he was the startled one.

"Forgive me," he finally said, unfolding his arms, and bowed his head. "It was wrong of me to eavesdrop."

She frowned at him. How had he even gotten in? Had he climbed the walls? Or was he the groundskeeper? But who tended the grounds in the middle of the night?

"I don't appreciate being spied upon," she sighed at length. "In the future, make yourself known."

She could see the smile that grew on his face, even with his head down. It was too wide in the flickering light of his torch, almost wicked. "My apologies. It will be as you say."

She closed her eyes once, lest she roll them in frustration at his cheek. But when she opened them again he was gone. She started, head whipping about as she scoured the garden for signs of him. But there was nothing. It was almost as if he had never existed.

There was no one left in the temple at that hour to inquire after an impertinent groundskeeper. And she was overdue as it was.

The princess returned home with her retinue after midnight. It had been an unnerving ride. She kept getting the feeling someone was breathing down her neck. There must have been a draft in the carriage.

She undressed and crawled into bed, and fell into a restless sleep.

Zelda got a late start the next day. She ate a quick breakfast, offered her prayers, and saw to her studies. It was an average sort of day, really.

Except for the fact that the groundskeeper from the graveyard was everywhere.

It was horrible and frightening and bizarre. He passed her twice in the library, ghosting between the bookshelves in the heartbeat span where her eyes would drop to the page, and when she would start and exclaim everyone would insist they had seen no one. His likeness was in a painting in the gallery, piercing blue eyes fixed on her as she walked past. His reflection was in mirrors and in silver serving dishes, but when she turned around he wasn't where he ought to have been. No one else ever seemed to see what she saw.

After three days of unaccountable startling, she found herself called on by the castle physician.

 _You've been under a lot of stress lately_ , he reasoned. _Your powers have yet to manifest. You're at a crossroads in your life. You and your father have been at odds. The mind is a powerful thing. Sometimes it conjures our fears in other forms. You should try to get some rest._

Needless to say, the visit didn't go well. And her unwelcome visitor only got bolder.

He flickered in and out of portraits as she wandered down hallways. His reflection was in window panes and the planes of the plate armor. More than once, when she turned to catch whatever had flickered out of the corner of her eye, he came from the other direction and blew out her chamberstick, leaving her alone in the dark, deafened by her own heartbeat.

Finally—frustrated, terrified, sitting at her dressing table—she confronted him. His reflection lingered behind hers in the mirror, dark except for the flicker of his lantern.

"I know you're real," she scowled, pulling gemstones from her ears and working to keep her voice steady. "I can't be imagining you."

He drifted closer, looming larger, until his hands came to rest on the back of her chair. She felt the lantern dangling from his fingers thump against the wood at her back, so tangible it made her heart stammer, and he leaned down to breathe on her ear, his eyes still locked with hers in the glass.

"Who says I'm imaginary?"

His voice, the whisper of his breath on her skin, sent a shudder down her spine and made the hairs on her neck stand on end. He turned, the tip of his nose brushing along the length of her perfectly tapered ear, and puffed a soft breath of laughter.

"I think you'll find I'm quite real."

His lips ghosted faintly, shamelessly, where her ear touched her jaw, and she lurched to her feet, whirling on him.

And there he was, taunting her in the flesh.

"You forget yourself," she hissed, hand flying to shield the place where his kiss still lingered, cold and burning, on her skin, but his smile only grew.

"Forgive me," he said again, and she doubted very much that he was actually contrite. "But I think in time you'll get used to it."

She scowled deeper at him, biting her tongue to keep an angry flush from her cheeks. " _In time?_ Do you know the trouble you've caused me? Half the castle thinks I've gone mad."

"You told me to make myself known. I was only obliging you."

She flinched as he made to round the chair between them, her hand coming up to stop his advance, and he paused, regarding it curiously. He raised his hand to meet it, his fingertips brushing hers, feather soft, and tracing a slow, deliberate path down their length to the underside of her knuckles. Even though her hand was gloved, she distinctly felt his skin on hers, cool and calloused, as though there was no fabric between them at all. It left her breathless.

"Does it matter what they think?" he murmured, meeting her eyes again, pressing imperceptibly closer. "You and I know the truth. Isn't that enough?"

"No, it isn't," she bit out. "I have enough to worry about without your constant disturbance."

"I've seen your routine," he smirked. "I'm not disturbing much. You're powers will manifest when they manifest, and no amount of praying will change that. And as for the rest—well, I thought you might appreciate a distraction."

"I don't," she seethed. "I want you to leave the castle at once."

"I can't do that."

"Then, at the very least, I don't want to see your face ever again."

He frowned at that, his eyes going dark, turning deadly, as the silence stretched.

"Fine," he spat, the cold fire of his glare the last thing she saw before he faded out of sight.

Then the chair between them hurled across the room so hard that the wooden legs splintered when it hit the wall, and she clutched her chest and screamed, panting and scowling as she overcame her surprise.

He wasn't going to make this easy.

His tantrum went on for days. Doors slammed behind her. Books tumbled off the library shelves and crashed to the floor. Candlesticks went out and tipped over, spilling hot wax all over her writing desk and half-finished letters. To say he had her on edge was an understatement. But she didn't know how to get rid of him, and there was no one she trusted enough to confide in.

So she dug in her heels and ignored him. He didn't like that at all.

He got more vindictive the longer it went on, slapping books out of her hands when she tried to read and thrusting her bedroom windows open in the middle of the night, letting the spring storms in. Once, he bunched the rug beneath her feet, and when she tripped over it she fell so close to the fire it singed her fingertips.

Things finally came to a head one night when, while she was sitting at her dressing table, he broke the mirror. Radial, spidery tendrils spread from the circle where it looked smashed in by a fist, and then spread out in thick, jagged cracks to the edge of the frame. The sound of it shattering made her just about leap out of her chair.

"You're behaving like a child!" she shouted, harried. "Show yourself at once!"

He flickered into view, his face repeating along the fractures in the glass, smiling. Because, of course, that was what he wanted all along.

"Forgive me, Princess," he said, and now she was sure it was a taunt. "Am I disturbing you?"

She stood, still trembling with aftershocks, and turned to scowl at him.

"I'm in no mood for your games. What do I have to do to get rid of you?"

"Quite impossible, I'm afraid," he intoned. "Even if I wanted to oblige you, I'm too entangled in your web to free myself now."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"These things rarely do," he said, lifting a hand to trace his knuckles soothingly across her jaw, but she batted him away.

"Just tell me what you want!"

His cocked his head at her like she was being obtuse. "Well I should think that was obvious."

" _Oblige_ me," she growled, using that word he was so fond of, and he took a prowling step closer.

He murmured, eyes ignited and intense, "You."

She wanted to lash out at him, wanted to shout and shove and call him a fool, but everything lodged in her throat when his fingertips ghosted over the back of her hand, up her wrist, along her arm, tracing a slow, deliberate path to her shoulder. Letting her burn and marvel in that otherworldly sensation of skin on skin, of his cool, calloused touch passing right through her sleeve. She watched his fingers crest the ridge of her shoulder, and he drifted closer, touching his lips to the exposed pulse point on her neck.

"You'll want me too, in time," he promised, and then her eyes locked with his, wide and startled and furious, and his glittered with laughter. "Have I forgotten myself again?"

She scowled, plowing through his shoulder, and when there was enough distance between them that she could breathe, she clenched her fists so her hands wouldn't shake and faced him.

"I want you to end this. Just stop tormenting me. Stop giving the entire castle yet another reason to think I'm a disgrace."

He approached again, tangling his fingers in hers and twisting their arms between them to press his lips to the back of her knuckles.

"And in return?"

"In private," she said haltingly, calculatingly, "and if I'm not busy, and if you _behave_ yourself… I won't ignore you."

He smiled devilishly. "Done."

"Now go away," she sighed, turning to pick up shards of glass from her mirror. "I'm busy."

She caught the glimmer in his eye in his reflection before he faded, and tried to push the feeling of his lips on her throat out of her mind while she conjured a plausible explanation for the state of her vanity.


	19. Survivor's Guilt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is an incredibly clumsy and literal take on a [beautiful metaphorical piece of art](https://empress-elizabeth.tumblr.com/post/626500893448224768/who-doesnt-like-some-pre-calamity-and) by [empress-elizabeth](https://empress-elizabeth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, I absolutely did not do it justice, go look at it and gush loudly if you haven't already!

_Prompt No. 19  
Word count: ~1615  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: A smidge of Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Self harm, blood, self doubt, guilt_

**Survivor's Guilt**

When Link found himself suddenly corporeal on the preternatural steps that led to the pedestal, suspended on nothing but air, he had to take a moment to sit down. He let his head fall back on the cool stone, just breathing, taking a quiet inventory of his limbs and organs. He hadn't expected the trial to be easy, exactly. He just hadn't expected it to come so close to killing him.

Once he had caught his breath, he heaved himself back to his feet, preferring to reclaim his sword and collapse in the tiny bed the Koroks kept for him rather than stay in that realm a moment longer than necessary. He climbed the tiers of the empyreal stairway, rising through the ether until he was basking in the glow of the shrine. Seven monks awaited him within, encircling the blade plunged into the pedestal.

The air around him thrummed and moaned, speaking for them. They spoke with several voices, but as one voice. It vibrated through him so hard he thought it might dislodge his ribs.

_You have done well… The depth of your heroism is beyond question. We are the ones who prepared this trial, following a revelation from the Goddess Hylia._

But then there was a pause. Pregnant. Heated. And suddenly there was dissension, too many disembodied voices speaking at once, coming from everywhere and humming through him until he feared his skull might crack. He fell to one knee, cradling his splitting head and pinching his eyes shut as the voices separated and collided.

_His hand is not worthy._

_He has not gained the power necessary to combat the Calamity._

_The sword calls for its master!_

_He is not ready._

_Something holds him back._

_Cripples him._

_He is consumed with doubt._

_And something else._

_Something stronger._

_Fear._

The voices stopped, hung on that word with a unanimity that was palpable.

And then the dais at his feet cracked.

_A final test is in order…_

The edges of the shrine turned brittle, stone flaking away in chunks that floated through the nothing and the rungs of the stairway behind him breaking up into useless, jagged pieces.

_This illusory realm was created from the depths of your memories…_

The monks around him began disintegrating one by one—not into spores of light, but into fragments, suspended in a disjointed mimicry of their whole selves.

_The enemy you shall face is a product of the fear that dwells within. You must overcome this fear to proceed._

The cracks at his feet spread, _grew_ , and suddenly swathes of the floor and tapered roof were dropping, falling apart, crashing into the solid remnants of the shrine and tumbling into the pit.

_This battle is a trial of the soul._

Link lunged for the sword, tried desperately to pull the blade from the stone as his hands sealed around the hilt. But it wouldn't come to him. The illusion wouldn't end.

_Do not take this place lightly, nor dismiss it as merely a world within your mind._

The monks fell next, their bodies reduced to ribbons that drifted down through the ether like feathers amidst the plunging steps and hunks of pedestal.

_The truth is much deeper than you know._

The rest of it gave way and he plummeted with a scream, his stomach and his heart shunting up into his throat and his voice eaten by the wind. He fell into the mist, into the nothing, tumbling and tumbling and tumbling. He was falling forever and for no time at all.

It was a thousand years. It was the blink of an eye.

And then he is somewhere else entirely.

The world is white. When the mist clears, he's standing in front of a stranger, and it's like looking in a mirror.

His eyes cut through the gloom between them, turquoise and aweless. He wears a gilded blue vest over a burgundy tunic, his hair tamed beneath a matching cap and the rest of him covered in white gloves and boots. It's a uniform he knows. He has one just like it stuffed in the bottom drawer at his house in Hateno. It had felt too familiar the one time he had worn it. Like a ghost draped over his skin.

"Well," he sighs, and the sound of his own voice addressing him makes Link's chest cramp. "Here we are at last."

Link draws his sword, inexplicably strapped again to his back; it's more of a reflex than it is spurred by reason, and his opponent closes his eyes and scoffs, unimpressed.

"You won't need your weapon here," he tells him. "I'm already dead, remember?"

He grips it a little harder. He says, instead of trying to deny it, "So were the Blights."

"What was it the Sheikah said to you? The truth is deeper than you know?"

His expression flickers bemused, and he scoffs at him again, crossing his arms. Link would almost call him smug, but there's something in his eyes so much stronger than vainglory: something closer to revulsion.

"Have you saved her?"

A stone rises in Link's throat as the accusation settles. He can't answer. It's all he can do to look him in the eye. His reflection steps closer, waiting for a reply. So close he could drive the Master Sword through him and be done with this, if he chose. But he can't bring himself to do it.

He's like a child, faced with the monster of his nightmares and too afraid to move.

"Of course you haven't," he says, his expression decidedly neutral. But there's derision in his voice. Disgust. Like he's addressing something so inferior it grates on him. "You don't even know who you are. How could you be expected to save someone else?"

Link sets his teeth, trying to ignore the sting of his words, their striking similarity to the ones he told himself so long ago, when he was trying to make his way down from the Plateau.

"I'll make do," he manages to say, but his voice is too quiet and scrapes up his throat like gravel.

"The Sword barely recognized you, and even now you wield it at a fraction of its true strength. You know why that is," he presses quietly, stalking closer. "You know you aren't as worthy of it as I was."

He bows his head, clenches his fists. He finally swallows the stone in his throat, but then he wishes he hadn't, because he can't keep the truth from spilling out, rough and breathless.

"Of course I know that."

"You'll be such a disappointment to her."

"I know."

"If she could trade your life for mine, she would."

"I _know_."

"You should just give up," he says, and his voice is like honey.

The world sways thick and hazy and pink, and he has to swallow before he answers. "I can't."

"Of course you can," he whispers, too soothingly, and Link doesn't resist as he pries the hilt of the Master Sword from his hands. "And then you won't have to see the look on her face when she realizes you're not who she thinks you are."

"She said… she said I was the light."

"She didn't mean you."

He holds his head as everything throbs, as his mouth and his fingers go numb. Everything is hazy and warm. Listless. He can't keep their exchange straight—remember who had said what, or who was right. He can't remember why it matters.

"I can help you," he promises, and offers him his hand.

Link takes him by the wrist. And though he can see it, though he can feel it, it's as though the action isn't his own. He turns, breath shallow, and leads his hand to his jaw, and then reaches for the hand holding the sword. He leads it to his neck, shivers as the cold steel presses against his skin. He feels his doppelganger at his back, feels his chin drawn aside. He can't tell who's leading who anymore.

"We were Hylia's perfect soldier," he laments in his ear as he pulls the blade across his throat, and the blood wells so thick it spills off the edge and down his neck. "Now there's only you."

The sword bites deeper. He can't tell which of them is the duplicate, the imposter, the marionette. All he knows is the crushing indifference and barest glint of horror as he abets his own murder. And he can't help but think that maybe it's better this way.

A word cuts like a glare across his brain, so bright and demanding he flinches: _No_.

What he is and what he's worth doesn't matter. He can't do this.

She needs him.

His own conviction hits him like a blow to the head. He whirls with a cry, wresting the hilt from his double and slicing him asunder with it in one swift motion, and clutches his gushing throat, gasping. His reflection is gone.

He tips over, breathless, and falls through the floor.

He hears the monks. They tell him he has proven his hand worthy. They tell him their sacred duty is fulfilled. They tell him to protect the kingdom of Hyrule, for now and for always. But as he tumbles through ether and mist, his own voice rings through his mind, even stronger and truer than the monks'. He doesn't fight to protect the kingdom. He fights to protect her.

He rematerialized at the pedestal and fell over. He cradled the hilt of the shimmering blade to his chest, and the Koroks rattled and twittered as he laid, breathless, in the grass.

He watched the sun filter through the canopy, and tried to picture her smile in it.


	20. Lost

_Prompt No. 20  
Word count: ~2090  
Universe: Twilight Princess; sequel to "No. 1 — Waking Up Restrained"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Self doubt, guilt, fear_

**Lost**

Link's recovery was slow going. He regained himself in pieces, in long, punishing battles fought in his own mind. Memories of the missing four months were scattered and incomplete, trickling back in dreams or disconcerting flashes that he couldn't make sense of. But sometimes his lack of progress seemed less a consequence of his spotty memory, and more a result of what he _could_ remember.

After everything he had done under the Gerudos' influence, he found it impossible to trust himself, even when his mind was at its most clear.

Zelda was eternally patient, comforting him through the turmoil and fortifying him through spells of despair. She tried to keep him busy, presenting the reports filed by the captain serving in his stead for his inspection and whatever else would fall under his purview. More than once, he came back to himself to find her asleep at his bedside. He couldn't account for it at all. Surely she knew better than to feel guilty over sending him on that mission, or to suppose that he expected preferential treatment.

But then, watching the first rays of sun filter through the curtains one morning, he was struck with the fleeting impression of silken hair slipping through his fingertips, of the pleasant give of soft lips under his, and all at once it made more sense.

He sunk his head into his hands and tried to call up the rest, tried to remember himself somewhere in the midst of it. But it was so hard to be sure of anything, even himself. _Especially_ himself.

By the time Zelda called on him, he had been pacing in a fog for an hour. He tried not to stiffen when she smiled at him, tried not to stare for too long as she crossed the room, left a parcel on his nightstand, and opened the curtains. But suddenly he couldn't take his eyes off her.

"You're up early," she said, and he forced his gaze away. It felt like there was nowhere for it to settle.

"Couldn't sleep," he frowned, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper.

She folded her hands in that thoughtful way she did, pensive, and glided across the room like a swan. She was always elegant, always poised. Had she always been so perfect? So terrifying?

"I can ask the apothecary for more herbs," she offered, but he shook his head.

"I just had a lot on my mind."

"Anything you care to talk about?"

He raked a hand through his hair, acutely aware of the way she studied him, trailing his movements. Probably looking for glimmers of the man she had drawn so much closer to over those missing four months. He had no idea if she found them or not.

"I don't—" He sighed at himself, quashing the urge to fidget. "I don't know. Maybe. I just… I remembered something this morning."

"Oh," she breathed, her brow drawing just slightly together, eyes brushing the carpet, shoulders falling so gently—feeling his pain with him. It felt like a punch to the stomach. He didn't deserve it. "I'm so sorry."

He knew what she was imagining—that he was seeing more violence, more senseless, bloody murders committed with his own teeth—and he was too quick to assure her, "No. Not that."

A sudden, pregnant silence descended on the room like a fog over a wayward ship. He could hear the pendulum of the grandfather clock in the hallway—or maybe he was hearing the click of the gears turning in her mind, dovetailing again and again as she drew one conclusion after another.

And he knew, when she finally met his eyes again, that it was written all over his face.

"I see," she finally said.

She waited through another stretch of that smothering silence, too composed to run, and he stood there uselessly, measuring the span of it by the deafening pulse in his ears. There was more than enough time for him to say something, _anything_ , to salvage the situation. But he just… let it slip through his fingers. And she was left picking up the pieces. Again.

"I brought the captain's report for you," she said, gesturing to his end table, "and I'll have them send up your breakfast."

He nodded, still exasperatingly mute. And she turned to leave. Not that he had given her much recourse. She paused in the doorway, brow furrowing in that rare display of troubled thought, and met his eyes again.

"I apologize if I've… done anything to make you feel uncomfortable," she said, offering him a grim smile that was too polite.

The door closed, separating them, completing the indifferent wall between them that should have left him feeling more numb than when she was there. But he didn't unfreeze. He just stood there like a fool, reliving satin strands weaved between his fingers and the barest hint of perfume on his tongue until someone arrived with his breakfast tray.

He didn't see her again for two days. He knew it was out of consideration for him—she was not one to be driven away by awkwardness or hurt feelings—but he couldn't help but feel it was a sort of punishment. Not that he didn't deserve it after how poorly he had handled the situation, of course, it was just… unpleasant.

It did give him some time to sort through the images rattling around in his head. And some of it did draw into better focus: standing at her shoulder like a shadow; watching her restrain a smile whenever some delegate or other was being particularly ridiculous and he met her eyes; staying up late with her in the library, retrieving books; asking with a smirk that was unmistakably wry, _Would it be completely untoward if I kissed you?_

But for all his dwelling, he was no more certain of himself than he was before.

She finally invited him to join her—quite late, and in a private, and through an extremely apologetic messenger who took pains to make it absolutely clear that he was at liberty to decline. He didn't waste a moment deciding.

She rose from the couch when he found her in front of the fireplace in one of her private parlors, wearing a smile that he supposed was meant to be reassuring—and was, in a way, even if it was a mask.

"Hello," she said.

Her voice was steady and perfect and elegant, like she was. He couldn't help but envy her poise a bit. She had told him once, before all this started, that he had _very expressive eyes_. He took that to mean he wore his emotions on his sleeve. He hadn't thought that a particularly detrimental quality at the time, but now he felt tossed out on the battlefield without a shield.

He swallowed his pride, crossing the room, and said, "Hello."

She gestured to the couch (and it was a dance they were used to: he was obligated to stay standing until she sat, but it was artless to let her sit down alone, so she moved slowly and he didn't defer, and they came down on the cushion more or less in tandem), and nearly as soon as they were seated she cleaved through the silence.

"Thank you for coming, Link. It was kind of you."

He scoffed quietly at himself—at how miserably he had botched her last visit, and how it was he who should be thanking her for the invitation. But he didn't bother contradicting her. She was both predisposed to and well-versed in the art of debate. And he was just a soldier. It wouldn't end well.

He smirked at her instead, warm and wry and as reassuring as he could make it, and said, "What can I do for you, Your Highness?"

Her expression was soft, but calculating, so there was no mistaking her words as either droll or distraught. She shot straight as an arrow. But where his eyes were expressive, hers were vacant, and perhaps that was most telling of all.

"I'm not a fragile woman, and I would much rather know the truth than waste time wondering, so please be honest with me. Were any of the feelings you expressed to me over those four months genuine, or were those sentiments the result of your conditioning?"

He had to swallow before he answered, had to lick dry lips. The words wouldn't come loose, the false starts piling up one after the other. But there was nothing for it. He couldn't give her a truth he didn't possess.

He finally whispered, his face all contrition, "I don't know."

"I see," she murmured, though the subtle shift of her eyes and shoulders said otherwise. Her lips pursed, betraying her dissatisfaction, before she pressed a little more. "I just assumed that if those feelings had been genuine, they would still exist. And if they hadn't—"

"It isn't that simple."

"Don't think you have to spare my feelings. I can accept it if the answer is no."

"That's not it."

She studied him, eyes colored with something he was sure he wasn't meant to see—frustration, and irresolution, and helplessness. "Then what is it?"

He pressed his mouth into his hand, not really sure where to begin. His mind was enough of a mess as it was. Trying to explain that mess to someone else was another thing entirely.

"You have to understand… I'd never let myself consider a relationship with you in that way because you always seemed so unattainable."

Her eyes softened a bit. "Was I really so frightening?"

"I herd goats for a living."

"And save kingdoms in distress and win interdimensional wars in your spare time," she smirked, leaning further back in the couch and smoothing an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt.

She was teasing him. He didn't remember her smirking much before. He decided he liked it.

But she had asked him for the truth, and he meant to give it to her, even if it was unpleasant.

"If I fell in love with you, I don't remember it," he said, and she nodded.

"I know."

He sighed, listening to all the unspoken questions whispering in the delicate silence that followed: _Could you love her? Would you? Or are you too broken to try?_

"Do you have any idea what it's like," he finally said, staring into the flames, "to close your eyes and see nothing but memories of hurting the people you care about?"

She said, too simply, "Yes."

He looked at her again, bemused, and stared as the pieces clicked idly into place. _Ganon_. That had been clumsy of him.

"That wasn't your fault," he whispered.

"Neither was what happened to you."

"So you keep saying. But I can't help feeling like I should have done more," he murmured, and then met her eyes. "I can't help feeling like I might still hurt someone."

She nodded, swallowing imperceptibly. She stared at the fire, or through it. And he was bound to her silence, to the nothing gnawing at both of them, until she took a breath.

"Link, I know I have no right to ask anything of you, or to demand an answer from you when you don't have one to give. I just…" She sighed, her shoulders finally sagging, her eyes finally drifting aimlessly. He thought he had never seen her looking so lost. "I just need to be able to think clearly."

He stared, wishing he could purge that uncertainty clouding her face, wishing he could earn another of her teasing smiles instead. And suddenly all he could think of was that half-forgotten sensation of her hair running over his fingers, of her lips brushing against his, soft as breath.

He reached over and pried her hand gently out of her lap where it was clenched over fabric, holding her fingers aloft with an obeisant, open grip, and then—hesitantly, wonderingly, reverently—pressed his lips to the back of her knuckles. The soft cloth of her gloves was nothing compared to the soft memory of her skin, all flawless and electrifying under his mouth, but a shiver ran down his spine all the same.

He met her eyes, warned her quietly, "We're going to have to start from the beginning."

She smiled again—quieter, not so teasing, splashed with firelight—and as she gave his hand a gentle squeeze, her eyes brimming with gratitude, he felt that perhaps the gods hadn't been so cruel as he thought.

Perhaps he could be redeemed after all.


	21. Infection

_Prompt No. 21  
_ _Word count: ~1520  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 18 — Paranoia"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Nonconsensual kissing, unhealthy relationships_

**Infection**

True to his word, he left her alone when his sudden appearance might cause embarrassment, and behaved himself when they were alone—mostly. He still liked to touch her too often, tracing circles around her knuckles when her hands were idle or letting his lips ghost over the ridges of her spine when he watched her work from over her shoulder, but a simple order for him to disappear put a stop to that whenever she wanted. Sometimes she found she didn't mind his attentions so much. Sometimes she didn't order him away at all.

When the seasons changed, crocuses sprouting all over the castle grounds to herald the onset of spring, and she sat at her writing desk frowning at her stationary, he had laughed at her.

"Isn't he the one you said was so horrible? And now you're father is forcing you to write to invite him here yourself? How humiliating."

She had rolled her eyes and told him to go away.

When the carriages bearing the High Prince Demetri and his entourage arrived at the castle gatehouse, and he stepped out of the coach in all his grandeur with a sweep of his raven hair, he had snorted.

"No wonder you don't like him. He's prettier than you are."

She had scowled at him and gone downstairs to greet their guest where he wouldn't follow.

But the visit was an extended one, and the longer it went on, the less amusing the specter haunting her bedchambers found him—and all the more so as the high prince supposed himself more familiar with the princess than he should have. His hand lingered too low on her back when they walked together or when they danced, or found her knee under the tablecloth at dinner. When she tried to shift away he gripped harder, pulling her leg as close as the furniture allowed, and passed her a smile that was much too gentle above the table.

"Get rid of him," he had hissed one night, when she happened to be the last one to slip into the drawing room and he had her alone.

" _Not here_ ," she bit back, making to leave him in the hallway, and his lantern and the candles in the room all sparked green and hot with his fury.

When she finally made it back to her chambers near midnight, slipping heavy jewelry off her neck with a sigh, the doors to the hall, the bathroom, and her closet all slammed shut in jarring unison, and she couldn't help the startled cry that pulled from her as she jumped.

"He's intolerable," he stormed, pacing into sudden, luminous corporeality with a glower that could turn the bravest of men to stone. "He acts like he owns you!"

But she had been manhandled and cowed quite enough for one night by then, and wasn't about to be the object of his bad mood as well. She dropped her jewelry onto the dresser and turned an icy glare on him. "Eerily familiar, isn't it?"

"I _do_ own you," he growled, stalking closer, "the same as you own me."

"I have no interest in _owning_ any part of you," she seethed, emboldened, stepping closer to meet him. "You're a soulless monster, and I want _nothing_ of yours. Not even your name!"

"That's unfortunate," he breathed, the words hot and threatening as though he were breathing fire, "because I want all of you."

And then he threaded his fist in her hair and crashed his lips against hers.

He was unrelenting and murderous, prying her lips apart with teeth and tongue, forcing her to taste, forcing her to breathe him in where he could cloud her head and weaken her knees. She grabbed his wrist on her neck, clawed at the shoulder of his tunic, but he was unyielding as stone. He pressed her back against the bed post when she tried to twist away, pulled her hair tighter when she bit down hard on his lower lip, and only when he felt her shudder with submission did he finally let her go.

"Link," he breathed, staring, pupils blown, at her swollen lips. "My name is yours, and yours alone."

"I don't want it," she insisted, choking on a sob as she tried to push him away. "I've never wanted it!"

"You'll use it. You'll call out for me. And I'll be there when you do."

_"Leave me alone!"_

He obeyed, whispering out of sight with a breath. The glow of his lantern lingered just a bit longer than the rest of him.

Zelda slid to the floor and wept.

He didn't confront her again for days. She still saw him, watching her from a respectful distance in the mirror, or staring up at her from the trembling waters of the courtyard fountains, but he never approached. It was a strange sort of role reversal; as though she were the one haunting him for a change. But she knew he was just waiting. Waiting for her to want him the way he always said she would, to call him back to her.

Well. He could wait for an eternity for all she cared.

Meanwhile, things with the high prince did not improve. He was boorish and presuming as ever, and had recently displayed a worrisome proclivity to overindulgence in wine. More than once, to her absolute mortification, he had swept her out of her seat in the drawing room for an impromptu waltz, which he somehow managed to convince everyone else in the room was a charming display of his affection. (Well, perhaps not _everyone_ , if the way the fire in the hearth licked with sudden tongues of green was any indication.) He enchanted his way around her court. He connected himself to all the right people and put on a convincing show for the benefit of her father. And when she eavesdropped on their informal negotiations, he made offers that even she had to admit were tempting, politically speaking.

She seemed to be the only one even remotely aware of his true nature, and whenever she spoke ill of him she was met with accusations of stubbornness and ingratitude. He was willing to overlook her disappointing performance when it came to unlocking her powers, after all, and the swirl of rumors surrounding her mental health, and wasn't that terribly kind of him?

The entire scenario was reaching a boiling point. And it all came crashing down at once.

The prince snatched her out of the hallway one night as she made for her chambers, stealing her away to the balcony in a whirling, drunken imitation of a dance, and pressed his mouth to her throat. She reeled, trying to rid herself of him the way she might slough off a layer of grime, but then his grip tightened and they were twirling again.

"I have your father right where I want him," he confided, laughing gently as he dragged her in clumsy circles. "I've promised him the moon for you, and when I step into his study tomorrow, he would have to be a fool to deny me. Celebrate with me."

Their spinning came to an abrupt end, her back hitting the wall in the shadows, and when he tried to lean closer, she wriggled and shoved. His grip tightened, eyes darkening dangerously, and her back hit the wall again, harder.

"Celebrate with me," he murmured again, and her heart stuttered at the intent in his voice.

She could smell the wine on his breath, taste it in his mouth as his lips sealed greedily over hers. He laved her neck with the flat of his tongue, roved up her bodice with his hand. She told him _No_. She told him to _Stop_ and _Disappear_ and _Leave her alone_. She squirmed and clawed until he pressed in so close she could scarcely move, and she gasped a trembling breath, ready to scream.

Then one of the stone urns came crashing down from the balustrade, sending dirt and fern fronds scattering everywhere. He startled, whirling, and in the moment of distraction lent her, Zelda fled. He was too drunk to walk in a straight line, much less keep up, but he tore after her anyway. She ran, heart in her throat, choking on sobs, doors slamming furiously behind her, and as she finally reached her chambers she screamed his name.

Link's arms wrapped around her as she dove forward, shielding her from the world outside her bedroom. A silent promise. She burrowed deeper into his throat, too upset to feel shame.

"I'll kill him," he growled into her hair, but didn't move to let her go.

"Don't bother," she wept miserably, just to be sure. "Just stay with me."

He held her a little tighter, warming her with that unspoken promise of security and the gentle glow of his lantern and the tantalizing sensation of skin on skin. She didn't even mind it, she realized. In her hour of need, in spite of everything, he was the only person who wouldn't doubt her, and the only person she wanted.

He had infected her, just like he always said he would.


	22. Withdrawal

_Prompt No. 22  
Word count: ~2530  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 14 — Fire"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Withdrawal symptoms, betrayal, misunderstandings, fluff_

**Withdrawal**

Zelda spent the next few weeks memorizing every smooth rise of scale, every furl of wing, the way his eyes glittered in firelight and the countless lines of his palm. He showed her the farthest corners of the world, from the untamed Hebra backcountry to the Akkala Sea, and every secret and wonder in between. He saw to her every need and denied her nothing, and constantly asked after her happiness.

He adored her. And with a devotion as strong as that, it was hard not to fall in love with him.

She stretched, turning her face into the sunrise and listening to the rush of Floria Falls crashing below. There was something peaceful and strange about traveling with him. A kind of loneliness in the quiet of it. They had yet to wander into civilization together, and he didn't seem to need or want that kind of mundane structure. She wasn't sure she did either, exactly. But it was all very transient.

The last few weeks there had been nothing but a whirlwind of beautiful places and each other. It was sort of like an incredibly long honeymoon. And it was lovely. But she couldn't help but wonder if their lifestyle would ever shift into something more stable.

Link crested the cliffs, wings tucking as he pounced onto their plateau overlooking the falls and the basin beneath, and she thought she would never tire of seeing his dragonshape melt off him like smoke. She got to her feet to meet him half way. He nuzzled into her neck, breathing deep and peppering her with soft kisses until he'd had his fill. It was a little like being greeting by a cat.

"How did you sleep?" he breathed, tangling his fingers in hers and planting another kiss to the crown of her head. (She had a nagging suspicion he was just scenting her hair again. She had asked him once why he was always sniffing her like a flower, and he had said, simply and a bit sheepishly, that she smelled nice. He tried to be less obvious about it after that. He wasn't very good at it.)

"Fine," she said, pursing her lips to keep from smiling too wide. "What did you bring me?"

They knelt in the grass and he spread out breakfast: foraged bananas and honeycomb. It was an inoffensive and safe selection after his attempts to introduce durian the day before, which hadn't gone particularly well. He rolled onto his elbow and kissed her knee, and then laid on his back and settled his head on her hip as she broke off a bit of fruit and dipped it in honey.

"Did you eat already?" she asked, eyeing the array that was decidedly sized for one, and he nodded. "What did you have?"

"A water buffalo."

"A whole water buffalo? For breakfast?"

He squinted up at her as the sun burned a hot trail into his eyes, bemused. "It was just a little one."

"But where does it all go? Does it shrink down with the rest of you when you change shape?"

His lip quirked, stray fingers drifting to trace her ankle and up the underside of her calf. "You ask the strangest questions."

She popped another wedge of banana into her mouth. Only he would find that so endearing.

"It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask," she bickered, her counterargument tempered slightly by the gentle circles he was drawing under her knee. She decided to quit while she was ahead and change the subject. "Where are we going next?"

"Wherever you want."

She twisted a nub of fruit in a slow corkscrew, catching the dripping tail of honey, and tested the waters a bit. "Do you have a home?"

"Not particularly. Just a few places where I keep some conveniences." His fingers, wandering by then up the back of her thigh, came to a sudden halt, and he craned his head to look up at her better. "Do you want that? Do you want to nest?"

"I didn't know dragons had nests."

"No, I mean—" he gestured a bit with a wide gathering motion, but it didn't convey much. "I've heard that about women. That you like a place to call your own and arrange just so. Like a hen feathering her nest."

"Don't make it sound so pedestrian," she cringed, but then admitted, "I wouldn't mind having someplace that was ours."

"Then we will," he promised. "Anywhere you want."

"Why don't you show me the entire world first, and then I'll choose from there?"

"Necluda next?"

She cringed again. "I'm from Necluda, remember? I've seen it."

"But you've never seen it with me."

She had to concede that point. He had a way of seeing the world from a different perspective—he said he knew how to tame water and speak the language of earth and fire and how to listen to the wind. If anyone could find wildness in a place as docile as that, he could.

They crossed Mount Floria and spent the morning exploring the peaks and valleys around Rabella Wetlands, and then walked as far as Cape Cales before he slipped into his dragonshape and carried her out to Eventide. He fished for them off the shores, and they spent an hour after their late lunch tangled in each other and basking in the sun atop Koholit Rock. They flew north over the open ocean, cutting back towards land at Afromsia Coast. They watched the sunset perched atop Walnot Mountain, ate supper, and settled into the slope to watch the stars.

The lanterns of Hateno glittered beneath them as night descended over the valley, and the lakes and waterways glowed orange in the torchlight. She had been up on that mountain before, watching the village drift towards sleep. But it had never seemed so small before.

That night, she slipped out of the perfect warmth of his arms, leaning down to drop a kiss on his mouth when he stirred, and promised she would be back soon. And like a fool, he let her go.

When Link woke in the morning, Zelda wasn't with him.

He started, disoriented and his heart drumming with panic, and listened. She wasn't very far; her song was still singing to him from the Hylian village in the valley. That calmed him, if only a little. But she had definitely been gone all night, if the way his head throbbed and his hands shook were any indication. The song wasn't quite as devastating as it used to be, but it still wreaked havoc when they were apart for too long.

He picked himself up, groaning, and peered down at the village, his eyes jumping between the rooftops, trying to pinpoint where she was. But it was too hard to be sure from this distance. And he couldn't help but wonder what had pulled her away in the first place. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that something had gone wrong, that she had been attacked or stolen or gotten lost; but the likelihood of any of that happening in a quiet place like this was slim at best, and didn't account for one glaring factor that he would much rather have ignored.

This was probably her hometown.

He had heard homesickness was like loneliness, that it made you long for a place or a person. He wondered sometimes if that was what brought him out to the Dragon Bone Mire sometimes to stand in the silence among his father's bones, long since indistinguishable from the others towering there. Maybe she had been pulled back to her home by a song not unlike the one that always pulled him towards her. Maybe she meant to come back to him, like she promised. Maybe all he had to do was wait.

Maybe.

But as he sat there, burning and tremoring, the sun crawling slowly but surely across the cloudless sky overhead, it got harder to ignore the pieces of the puzzle he didn't want to acknowledge: that she hadn't said where she was going, that she chose to leave despite knowing he would suffer for it. That she hadn't come back. All of it leading him irrevocably to the conclusion that she didn't want him to follow. What was it she had said the day before? That she wanted a home?

Maybe she had decided he couldn't give her one.

He waited on the mountain until the sun set. When he finally doubled over and coughed fire into the grass, he was forced to accept that he either had to close the distance between them, or else fly out to sea and find some place to die alone.

He wasn't proud enough for that. He got to his feet and stumbled down the mountainside after her.

He followed the song to the outskirts of the village. It was late by then, late enough that most of the lanterns had been put out. Still, he was careful to stay out of the light, slipping between buildings until he was in the shadow of a windowless house and the song was crashing on him so loudly he had to sit down for relief. He pressed his hands to the wood, rested his forehead on the panels, just listening. She was just on the other side of the wall, so close he could almost feel her. Almost.

He put his back to the wall, reveling in _almost_ , and after a day and a night alone, it was more than enough to lull him to sleep.

The next morning he woke to the sun burning a hole in his head. He pinched his eyes shut, grimacing, and reached for her. It wasn't until his knuckles met the wood between them that he was able to blink some clarity into his brain. If the tumult of the last two days could be called clarity.

He still didn't know where he had gone wrong. He had really thought she was happy with him. Or maybe he had been too absorbed in his own happiness to notice. She had never said otherwise, and that was driving him mad. If he had know, maybe he could've…

He let his head fall back against the wall with a _thunk_. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to face her eventually. He crept to the lee side of the building, waited until the coast was clear, and slipped through the front door.

And suddenly he knew why the building was windowless: it was a prison.

And Zelda was jailed.

And she was yelling at him.

"What took you so long?" she demanded, pacing to the bars separating them with her arms crossed, furious as he had ever seen her. "Do you have any idea how worried I've been?"

"How did you—? What _happened_?"

"Well _apparently_ it's a bad omen for a sacrifice to reappear in her village, one I would have happily spared them if anyone had _told me_ ," she huffed, "and now I'm locked up so I don't run away while they decide whether it would appease you more if they strap me back on that altar, pick a new girl, or drown me in the river."

"Then they really should've put you in a prison that was more dragon-proof," he sighed, kneeling to breathe on the lock.

"And at first I wasn't even upset by it. I knew everyone here was superstitious and backward, and that you'd come for me first thing in the morning. But then you didn't, and I was just so, _so_ —" She stomped her foot. "What took you so long?"

The lock glowed orange, the iron so hot and soft it stretched and pulled apart when he yanked on it. He swung the gate open and it creaked on its hinges. She padded out of her cell, looking miserable, and turned into him, dropping her forehead against his throat.

"I'm sorry your homecoming didn't go the way you hoped," he murmured, pressing his mouth to her hair against his better judgment, brushing stray strands behind her ear, indulging in the slender dip of her waist while she still let him.

She snorted. "I don't know that I _hoped_ anything. When I made the choice to stay with you I had no intentions of ever coming back here again."

He knew he probably wouldn't like the answer, but he couldn't help but ask. It would torture him forever if he didn't. He breathed, "What made you change your mind?"

"Well, it's not as though I came back here on purpose," she shrugged, and then stopped, stepping back to look at him properly. "Is that what you thought?"

Her brow had fallen, her expression simmering again with that same directionless, frustrated anger from earlier, and suddenly, too many emotions bubbling over at once, he found himself mirroring her.

"You left in the middle of the night and didn't come back. What was I supposed to think?"

"I went to take a _bath!_ I knew there was a lake right down the hill, and you were sound asleep, but there were villagers in the foothills and of course they recognized me—"

"None of this would have happened if you had just _called for me_ at the first sign of trouble—"

"There were no signs of trouble! They weren't _violent_ about it, they just said that I was needed in the village and it was urgent. I didn't think I'd be gone overnight, much less jailed when I went along with them!"

She huffed a growl when he didn't have an immediate rebuttal, dropping her head on his neck again, but he got the distinct impression it was as much so she didn't have to look at his infuriating face as it was a gesture of affection. He wrapped his arms tighter around her waist anyway.

"I was worried you weren't happy being with me," he murmured.

"You treat me like a princess," she grumbled into his throat. "Of course I'm happy. And don't talk to me about worry. I thought you were half-dead somewhere on that mountain."

He snaked an arm up around her shoulders, pulling her into a proper embrace, and burrowed his nose in her hair without a thought for subtlety. "I'm not as fragile as you think."

"Just take me home."

He sighed. There was that word again. _Home_. He wished it didn't make him feel so inadequate. He swallowed his ego and asked, "And where is that?"

She looked at him like he was being obtuse. "Wherever you are."

Something warm stirred deep in his chest that had nothing to do with the emberglow. He scooped her greedily into his arms and carried her bridal-style out the door, noting with some pride that she didn't squeak in protest, even as villagers in the streets spotted them and erupted in a panic.

"Then come along, princess," he said, grinning at her, and whispered, just before he melted back into his dragonshape in a flourish of smoke and wings, "We have a lot of world left to see."


	23. Exhaustion

_Prompt No. 23  
_ _Word count: ~2030  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 17 — Dirty Secret"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Exhaustion, capture, escape_

**Exhaustion**

Link was from a realm where the sun never rose and never set. When Hyrule drifted briefly through the rift between night and day, his world seeped through in molten colors: a realm that lingered in the eternal in-between suspended along the seam of night and day. He said it was called Twilight.

She couldn't help but wonder if that was a common name, shared by them all for that realm before the schism of their ancestors, or if it was borrowed, taken from the Interlopers who had been banished there and passed on as a word of their own imagining. A phrase for the quality of light or the mood of the sky. Just another deception, meant to erase them from history.

"It's looking much better," she told him, removing the last of the strips of cloth she had clumsily dressed his wounds with that first night and applying some potion to his back. He was looking better on the whole, really—even the glow had faded from most of his skin, except for a jagged cut from his temple down his cheek, and another across his shoulder. He said they were scars. She rather thought they suited him, though she kept that to herself. She capped the bottle and patted his shoulder. "There. All finished."

He turned slowly as she put her medicinals away, watching her with that peculiar look that she had seen on his face yesterday, and the day before that. She arched an eyebrow at him.

"What?"

"You look exhausted."

"How incredibly rude," she smirked, stuffing the last of the bottle into her satchel. "I'm fine."

"You're not. I can see it in your eyes," he said, running his thumb across her cheekbone. She did her best not to startle; she wasn't used to be touched so familiarly, or so often. But she could hardly cry foul when she was the one who had started it. "When was the last time you had a decent night's rest?"

"Sleeping is a waste of time," she quipped, but he didn't look particularly amused. The truth was she had been running on a mere handful of hours of sleep per night since she found him. It was hardly sustainable. But there was too much to do. She sidled up beside him against the cavern wall, determined, and deflected, "Now tell me more about the Twilight and the portal you came through."

"I'll tell you," he said, shifting gently under her so his arm was around her shoulders and tipping her head back so it leaned on his shoulder, "if you promise me you'll try to sleep."

"But what if I—"

"I'll wake you long before sunrise," he promised, and as she didn't really have any other objections other than an unhealthy desire to satisfy her own curiosity, she yielded.

He told her about the sky there, painted in glittering blooms of pink and orange and yellow. He told her about the towering palace, and the sols, and the great machines they powered. He told her about the portal they had built, and how he came to volunteer himself to be the first to step through. The portal had spit him out in some old ruins. There was no way for him to cross the desert to find help, and the mechanism that was supposed to allow him to activate the portal from this side wasn't working. He was half-alive when the ringmaster found him.

"There has to be a way to get you home," she mused, picking her head up to look at him properly. "Maybe in the library—"

He pushed her head back down. "You're supposed to be sleeping."

She shut her eyes obediently, and only managed to get in a few minutes of scheming before she finally slipped under. He woke her while it was still dark and she took her usual route back to her room, and then collapsed in bed.

She blazed through her tutoring sessions the next day with all the concentration she could muster, eager to get some time alone in the library. But there was so little on the Twili in the first place, and much less over how to reach them. There were several references to the mirror that had once been in the Gerudo Desert—and perhaps some correlation to the location of the original waypoint was the reason Link had arrived there?—but according to legend it had long since been shattered, and the knowledge of constructing that sort of bridge between worlds was lost with it.

Still, there was a small journal with sketches of the mirror in its whole form, and as much information on the details of its shape as she could find, and she supposed it was better than nothing. She absconded with it and tucked it safely away in her room to bring to him that night.

Supper was quiet that evening. Her father had business that kept him holed up in his study, so she ate alone. She didn't mind; it meant there was no one to question her when she stuffed a few sweet rolls into her napkin and folded the corners into a little bundle for later. When she got back to her room, she stacked the journal and rolls on her nightstand, and then put her head down—just for a moment, just to give her eyes a rest—and promptly fell asleep.

It was late when she started awake again, if the embers in the fireplace were any indication. Very late.

She groaned, snatching at her cloak and the bundle on her end table without even bothering to change, and headed for the Castletown gates.

It was a little more difficult to sneak about, her skirts shuffling around her feet with every step, but the guards on her route were as inattentive as ever. Tonight especially so. There weren't even any guards watching the bridge. She really needed to address that.

But then, crossing Hyrule Field into the treeline, she saw the unmistakable glow of lantern light flickering in the woods, and she suddenly knew why the guards had abandoned the gates.

They were here, with the ringmaster. Arresting a runaway circus freak.

Link was gagged and his wrists were bound, struggling at the end of a lead rope and flinching in the firelight.

"Stolen cloak, stolen boots, stolen food and medicine," the captain tsked as they forced him to his knees, and drew his sword. "Well. We have ways of dealing with common thieves."

They pulled the rope hard, yanking his arms out, and knelt on the slack as the guard measured the strike with the tip of his blade.

"I think you'll find it much more difficult to steal with no hands."

"And you'll look all the more freakish for the show," chided an onlooker—the hunter, maybe. "Won't you Beastie?"

The blade came up, readying the strike and catching fire, and Zelda's heart jammed in her throat.

_"Stop!"_

She felt ridiculous running at them in her massive skirts, but it was enough of a spectacle that it made the captain hesitate, and, she supposed, made her all the more recognizable as she shed her hood.

"Your Highness," he balked. "Forgive me. If I had known you were there, I would never have subject you to—"

"Displays of wanton cruelty?" she scoffed. "Unhand this man at once."

"But, Princess," he spluttered as she knelt to unfasten his wrists, "he's a criminal. A common thief!"

"I _purchased_ the food and medicine for him, and I'm the one who stole the cloak and the boots," she huffed, pulling the gag from his mouth and working the knot out of the bindings. "So if you feel an urgent need to cut off someone's hands, you may cut off mine."

The arched an eyebrow at the guard, waiting for a retort, but as he looked properly mortified, she went back to working off the last bit of rope. She touched his mouth once his hands were free; his lip was split and bleeding. She smirked at him.

"Put up a bit of a fight, did you?"

He gave her a grim smile. And then the ringmaster cleared his throat.

"With all due respect, Princess," he murmured, his voice gruff with the very great effort of showing decency to another human being, "but this beast is my property, and represents a significant investment in my traveling enterprise."

"The very questionable legality of his becoming your _property_ aside, I have the means to compensate you handsomely for your generously releasing him to me," she said, and it seemed universally recognized that that was the final word on the matter.

The captain frowned thoughtfully, watching her with eyes that were much too careful. He seemed to have overcome his shock at her sudden appearance, and was pitting the oddness of her arrival against the hour and her lack of escort and her reputation for sneaking off and who knew what else. It made her want to squirm. But of course, princesses didn't squirm. They pulled themselves an inch taller, they met quizzical expressions with unreadable ones. But he was less easily startled than she would have liked.

"Then my men and I escort you and your guest back to the castle at once."

"That's very kind of you, captain, but unnecessary."

"I insist."

Zelda stifled a sigh. Marching straight into the castle meant an explanation to her father, who was liable to punish anyone and everyone to satisfy his temper and as a means of punishing her. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the saying goes. But they could hardly flee. Even if they managed to outrun this batch of soldiers, there would be more, and the crimes leveled against him would certainly escalate from petty theft to kidnapping a crown princess.

"Very well," she said airily, getting to her feet as decorously as possible while her pulse sputtered.

She pictured him in the dungeons as they turned towards castle town, a prison so much worse than his cage had been, pictured him bound and flogged and left to burn in the sunlight, her heart seizing. She couldn't be responsible for that. But she didn't know how to save him. If he ran now, they would cut him down. And there would be no placating her father after this.

By Nayru's love, how had she been so selfish?

But then the air in front of them erupted, splitting open in so many squirming, black tendrils and angular, glowing lines. From the yawning void at its center, orange light burst forth like the last rays of a setting sun, and she knew what it was by instinct as much as by reason: Twilight.

Link's eyes met hers, all wide and glittering, and she whispered, "Run!"

He tore across the field towards the portal. The soldiers gave chase, but they were easily dissuaded.

"No, stay back!" she shouted. "Stay back, or you'll be drawn in!"

She was bluffing, of course, but they didn't seem inclined to test her. They backed away, raised weapons and owlish eyes betraying their fear. Link was surrounded by light, _swallowed_ by light, but it didn't harm him. His feet met invisible steps, carrying him into the glowing maw, and Zelda held her breath, certain this would be the last she would see of him.

Then he stopped at the podium, half-consumed, and turned to look back at her. He held out his hand and said, "Come with me!"

Maybe it was the lack of sleep wreaking havoc on her addled brain, but it was as though she had always known he was going to ask her. The sun was flickering to life in the east. And she was in the divide between night and day, staring into the heart of Twilight. She didn't need a moment to decide.

The soldiers and circusfolk called after her as she ran, but her earlier warning kept them at bay. She grabbed his outstretched hand and let him pull her into the glow.

He pulled her into his arms, and they fell out of one world and into another.


	24. Blindfolded

_Prompt No. 24  
_ _Word count: ~910  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: None  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Intent to kill, killer!pov, change of heart_

**Blindfolded**

Have you ever been lied to? And I don't mean a white lie. I don't mean the sort of meaningless untruths that people pass around like a lot of spare coin. I mean the sort that you realize have shaped your life, and might well shape your future. The type that have you stumbling around like a fool with a blindfold pulled tight across his eyes your entire life.

It's not pleasant.

_"Remorse is a hindrance. Learn to ignore it."_

_"Good advice. Do that, and you'll never outlive your usefulness."_

_"Think you can do that, boy?"_

The girl was absurdly easy to track. I shadowed her as far as the Great Hyrule Forest in the north—a dark and forbidding place, perched on its own moated isle. It was as simple as following a lamb into a pen and closing the gate behind us.

Things got a little trickier there, but she seemed hardly able to find her way any better than I could, both of us subject to the whim of the mist. Not that I minded. I had time to spare, and in woods as foreboding and isolated as those, there would be no one to hear her scream.

_"Kill her."_

_"Any particular method?"_

_"No. Just bring me her heart," the queen hummed after a moment's consideration, turning to arch a slender brow at him. "That should be easy enough for someone like you."_

The forest opened again, just enough that I could make out her silhouette between the trees. She stiffened as I made a wide approach in the dark, sensing she wasn't alone—alert, listening, like a doe before the bow looses its arrow.

She turned, making a broad sweep of the mist, and I turned with her, spiraling closer, closer, until I could make out her pulse throbbing in her neck, quick as a rabbit's. I drew my knife, a whisper of metal in that eternal, threadbare silence. But then the darkness thinned, the fog suddenly breathing apart to reveal a path into filtered light. You could spend a lifetime lost in those woods if you weren't careful. I put my knife away. It was an opportunity I had no intention of letting slip by.

I stepped out of the trees and grabbed her, muffling her scream in my hand.

_"You know, they say she wants her dead because she's so much more beautiful than she is."_

_"What do I care for the queen's vanity?"_

_"Aren't you worried? That a face as pretty as that will haunt you once the deed is done?"_

_"No," he said, and he meant it._

_He had it on good authority that you needed to feel something to be haunted._

I bound her hands and her eyes and dragged her towards the path by the waist. She didn't put up much of a fight, which was a little odd. There wasn't the usual kicking and screaming and wailing. She just held my arm, trembling. Like she knew this was coming, and she was resigned to it.

The path didn't lead to the mouth of the woods. It was some kind of grove—peaceful, beautiful even, but not the exit I was hoping for. It meant I was still somewhere on the isle. I rolled my eyes at my rotten luck, and turned my attention back to the job at hand.

I tossed her to the ground and she wriggled a bit, breathless, those preservation instincts finally punching to the surface. Not that there was anywhere for her to go. I straddled her at the ribs, caging her arms between my legs, and brought my knife against her throat. And then I pulled her blindfold loose, because I believe in looking something in the eye when you kill it.

And that was when all the lies unraveled. Because suddenly I had purpose. Suddenly I realized how close I had come to killing the one thing I was meant to protect.

I was feeling too much at once.

It was like lifting off a blindfold.

"It's ok," she whispered, tears slipping out of the corners of her eyes as we stared at each other, wide-eyed and panting. "It's ok. If you don't, she'll kill you, too."

I couldn't believe how she said that like it mattered. Like anything else could matter when she was here, and she was alive, and she was staring through my soul and unlocking pieces of me I didn't even know were buried there.

I scrambled off her, cutting her bindings loose, and stood, raking my fingers through my hair like I could slough off the tremors coursing through my whole body.

"You need to get out of here," I told her, and for a moment she didn't answer, still sitting there, shell-shocked, soothing her wrists. She finally swallowed.

"And go where?"

"It doesn't matter. As far away as you can."

"But what about—?"

I met those eyes again, those soul-renting green eyes, and trembled when I thought about how close I had come to stealing that spark of life out of them.

I murmured, "Let me worry about the queen."

_"Do not fail me."_

_"Yes, my queen."_

_"And if I cannot have her heart, Huntsman," she warned him as he turned to leave, "I will have yours."_

_That was a tired threat. He'd heard it a dozen times before. Sometimes he wondered why she felt it bore repeating. She couldn't really think this Zelda would be different from any of the others, could she?_

_When had he ever failed her before?_


	25. Blurred Vision

_Prompt No. 25  
Word count: ~910  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; prequel to "No. 26 — Blindness"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Human shield, eye injury_

**Blurred Vision**

Link kept his eyes open and his mouth shut as the captain led him up into the lower courtyards. The grounds were crawling with Sheikah researchers, scribes, and a handful of bodyguards, making a Hylian military presence superfluous at best. But there were two soldiers assigned to escort the princess during the tests, and he had begged for the opportunity.

He could hardly get noticed guarding the docks or the front gates like empty plate armor.

"Don't screw this up, kid," the captain breathed, stationing him near the west wall. "And try to stay out of her way."

Link only nodded, wary of opening his mouth to answer. And nearly as soon as the captain had disappeared back into the castle halls, his comrade relaxed, shedding his helmet and moving towards an unsuspecting maid still cleaning up the cookery from lunch to flirt. Link tried to ignore them, not least of all because he was easily 15 years her senior and she looked barely of age—though she hardly seemed to mind the attention, blushing prettily at every easy compliment. He meant to be vigilant, even if he was an extra accessory. But he did remove his helmet after the first uneventful hour, especially as it was a hot day and no one seemed to notice his existence anyway.

The machine they were running tests on was supposed to be some sort of autonomous weapon. A Guardian, they called it. It was impressive looking, with all its lights and hulking stature, but they hadn't managed to get it to do much of anything besides glow. A few of the scientists were huddled around it and the slate device, trying to activate more systems—including Lady Impa, who he had met not long ago, when Castletown was under siege from marauding Moblins.

The princess was kneeling in the grass with Lady Purah, poring over diagrams and numbers that he couldn't make out from his respectful distance. Not that he thought he would be able to make heads or tails of it besides. He didn't know the princess well, but he had been watching her long enough to know she was brilliant, even if most people chose to ignore those gifts in favor of fixating on the only one she didn't seem to have. Purah gestured wildly, and she laughed; it was nice to hear her laugh. He wasn't sure he ever had before.

She wiped a line of sweat from her brow, finally yielding to the heat, and stood to take a break, heading for the shade of the wall. Link stood a little taller as she passed him by; if the knight who was supposed to be his other half hadn't wandered off with the maid ten minutes ago (and left behind a pile of cookery), he might have accused him of having a crush. Which was ridiculous. He was just doing his job properly. Which was more than he could say for him.

The princess unscrewed the cap of her canteen to take a drink; one of the Sheikah turned from beneath the edge of the carapace to tell his companion to "try it now"; and with a piercing, ungodly whine, light and fire burst from the Guardian's glowing eye and took down the far wall, raining stone and mortar over the courtyard.

Its head spun, its eye flickering a frenzied stutter in warning. Aiming right for the princess.

Sheikah called on magic, teleported, cloned, ran. Rushing towards her from all directions and by any means necessary.

They weren't going to make it.

Link stepped on the edge of a nearby pot lid, flipping it into his hands as she whirled, hair fanning around her shoulders like rays of the sun. He put himself between her and the incoming beam, counting his breaths, counting his heartbeat, and parried.

The beam split. Half of it bounced skyward, another shaft hit the ground and left a crater, spraying dirt and sod everywhere. And the pot lid shattered, letting through a splinter of light that grazed him across the eyes.

The force of the impact on his shield knocked him off his feet, and he landed on the flat of his back, breathless. He heard the whine again and sat up in time to see the Lady Impa and her clones force the Guardian on its side, where it fired three more shots harmlessly into the sky before they managed to deactivate it. At least, he thought they were her clones. It was hard to say. He blinked, trying to get his vision to clear. But everything was a haze.

By then the princess was swarmed with Sheikah, ready to teleport her away, but she pushed through them, going to her knees. She took his face in her hands, her thumbs gently tracing soothing lines across his cheeks, just below where his skin still burned. And where she touched burned in a different way.

"We need to get him to the infirmary," she ordered, her pretty brow creased with concern.

He nearly told her he was fine, that she needn't worry about him. But she was dancing in blurry duplicate, and getting dimmer. And dimmer. And his heart stammered as he blinked, and blinked again, trying to force her clear, and as her hand rested so softly on his neck, cradling his head.

All right. Maybe he did have a bit of a crush. And maybe he did need a doctor.


	26. Blindness

_Prompt No. 26  
_ _Word count: ~1340  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 25 — Blurred Vision"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Blindness, burdens, commiseration_

**Blindness**

A few hours later, his vision was gone completely.

The castle physician made a thorough examination, and prescribed a strange concoction of eye drops for the pain. But he warned him that the prognosis wasn't good. Well-meaning friends told him not to listen to the naysayers—Nell, especially, with whom he shared quarters in the barracks. But he knew better. He knew he wouldn't see again.

Things only got worse from there.

They kept him in the infirmary for nearly a week, but it quickly became apart that, besides a lack of eyesight that the doctors were incapable of treating, there was nothing much wrong with him. They couldn't keep him on bedrest forever, and the castle had no use for a blind soldier. So he was to be discharged from the infirmary, and then honorably discharged from the army.

"You can't do that," Nell had seethed when they delivered the news, and Link didn't need his sight to picture the shade of red his face was turning. "He saved the princess's life!"

"And the kingdom is very grateful for that. But the fact of the matter is he cannot be a soldier if he cannot see. Unless you're suggesting we keep him here indefinitely—"

"He has the Sword that Seals the Darkness!"

 _"Nell!"_ Link had hissed, mortified, not daring to reach for his shoulder for fear he would miss.

But once the words were spoken aloud, there was no getting them back. They found the sacred blade where he had hidden it beneath his cot, and his secret was out. It was even worse than he had imagined it would be. Not only was the hero they had all been waiting for just a boy, he was also irreparably damaged. _Blind_. And nothing dampened hopeful spirits like a harsh dose of reality.

Still, Nell's outburst had had the desired effect. Instead of tossing him out onto the streets, they moved him to a private suite (which Nell wouldn't stop whistling over), and had the physicians call on him regularly to monitor his condition. He had the castle staff at his disposal, and ate meals from the king's table. It was lavish, and ridiculous. He had never felt more pitied and useless in his entire life.

_"Master…"_

"I'm not your master. Not anymore," he gritted out, gripping the scabbard too hard. "You need to find someone else."

_"Have courage, Master. You must have courage."_

There was a soft rapping at the door. He put the blade aside, letting it slip between the far side of the bed and the nightstand—out of sight, where it belonged. He was getting better at using things other than his eyes to orient himself, and knew his routine by now. The sun on his face told him it was early afternoon. They had already cleared his lunch tray, so there wouldn't be any more scheduled visits until suppertime. He could only think of one person who would call on him so randomly.

"Come in," he said, and chided him as the door opened, "If you've brought me the paper again, that joke is getting a little old, Nell."

"I'm so sorry; I can call back later if you're expecting someone else—"

Link's heart jammed in his throat as he scrambled to put his feet on the floor, as he tried to steady himself on the end table and figure out where to let direct his eyes. But then she was there, her voice so near he had to swallow. _The princess._

"Please, don't get up. I didn't mean to bother you. I just… I wanted to thank you. For what you did for me."

He swallowed again. What could he say to that? That it was nothing? That it was his duty, or his honor? Nothing felt right. His voice was rough in his throat when he finally said, "It was a sloppy parry."

She paused, suspending his silence, his darkness, in the strangest sort of static. He couldn't read her expression, her body language, her eyes; he listened to her breath instead, so quiet he shut his eyelids out of habit as he strained to hear. Then cloth rustled, the mattress depressed beside him, she sighed—and in his mind, he could almost picture her sitting there, her brow creased in thought.

"I'm sorry. If I had been more careful, you might still have your sight."

He frowned. "It wasn't your fault."

"That's not what the people say," she whispered, but between the misery in her voice and the quiet, he could hear a grim smile on her mouth. "They say I've failed to unlock my powers and I've maimed the Chosen Hero. That I've managed to doom the kingdom while not yet seventeen. It's hard to argue with their logic."

"I've heard we're a curse from the gods," he breathed, daring to smirk at something so hopeless. "That they've sent broken saviors as punishment for their lack of piety over the last few centuries."

"I'm not sure even they could be that cruel," she quipped, but he sensed her smile vanished the same as his. Because they had been that cruel to them. She shifted, looking for distraction. "Is that it? The Blade of Evil's Bane?"

He turned slowly, lips pursed as he reached across the bed for it. Somehow he never groped blindly for the hilt. His hand always found it on the first try, like it was drawn. He laid the scabbard carefully across their laps and pulled the sheath away. He could feel her fingers run down a section of the blade as though they were running down the length of his arm.

"It's beautiful," she said, and he felt the sword hum proudly. It made him smile. He had never thought of the sword as vain. But apparently even it wasn't above a bit of preening. The princess noticed, borrow amusement on her voice. "What is it?"

"The sword," he murmured. "I think it enjoys being admired."

He heard her swallow. "Can you hear the voice?"

"Sometimes."

"What does it say?"

He bowed his head a little, eased the blade slowly out of her hands and slid it back into the scabbard. The ricasso peeked out a bit, drawing his sightless eyes as his thumb ran across its smooth edge, and for a moment he had the oddest sensation of looking at himself.

"It says it won't choose someone else," he told her hoarsely. "That it wants me, even though I've explained that I'm not fit to wield it."

"I've asked the gods for someone to replace me, too," she admitted. "No answer thus far. I think the kingdom may be stuck with us."

For just a moment he let himself imagine them overcoming their faults, and how brilliant they would be if they did: a princess aglow with power, stepping into her true nature when the world least expected it, and her knight beside her, steadfast, fearless, unseeing, armed with a sword that whispered to him in the midst of battle—a sword that, if he listened, was as good to him as a pair of eyes.

She sighed, pulling him out of his daydream. "At least we won't have to worry about disappointing them. No one expects us to succeed."

He stared into the dark, imagining half-formed shapes where his eyes would have filled in the rest. The color of the quilts on his bed, or the tunic they had laid out for him that morning, or the wallpaper. The only thing he could picture with any confidence was her face. It had been the last thing he had seen with any clarity, he realized, and suddenly he was so very glad for that.

"Well then, princess," he said, lifting his eyes to meet hers in that endless dark, picturing flawless emerald and thrilling a bit at his own boldness. "Shall we prove them wrong?"

He couldn't see her smile, but he could feel it. It was warm on his face, like rays of the sun.


	27. Extreme Weather

_Prompt No. 27  
_ _Word count: ~1600  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 15 — Science Gone Wrong"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Frostbite/hypothermia, snuggling_

**Extreme Weather**

They stumbled back into the cabin—wet, trembling, fingers bent and frozen—and set about staving off hypothermia however they knew how. Link stacked logs on the grate in the hearth with numb hands, and Zelda piled every pillow and blanket in the room into a nest in front of the fireplace. She peeled off her boots and damp socks, her jacket, and wriggled out of her sodden trousers with a great deal of effort. He was making significantly less progress, his fingers even more swollen and red than hers, and after a third unsuccessful attempt at unfastening a button on his jacket she intervened.

"Let me," she insisted through chattering teeth, and he didn't have the pride to argue. Even nearly frostbitten her fingers were deft, and after making quick work of his overcoat she helped him with belts and laces and everywhere else he was helpless, and once they were rid of everything that was wet they dove for the blankets. She mumbled from inside her bundle of wool, still quaking all over, "You shouldn't have come after me."

"You're welcome," he growled, burrowing deeper, and breathed on his aching hands.

The wind howled with the blizzard outside, making the rafters creak, and the egg beeped nervously to itself where it was huddled in the corner. Her eyes flickered over the walls, to the hearth, to the shelves, betraying her scheming, and then pinched closed.

"We need t-tea," she managed, swallowing. "Safflina."

The little guardian whirred to life, hanging the kettle over the fire without prompting. Zelda stood, taking as much of her blankets with her as she could, and yanked a chain of dried flowers off the wall. She spread the bundles out as soon as she was back on the floor, curling as close to the fire as she dared, and set about plucking the petals and seed pods off the stems. But it was a tedious task at the best of times, and her fingers were barely working.

"Is that really necessary?" he sighed, watching her pitiful progress, and she spared the energy to scowl at him.

"If I boil the stems along with the flowers, it will reduce the potency."

"Skip the boiling, then. Can't we just eat them?"

"I hate when you ask s-stupid questions!"

He reached forward with a growl, cupping her numb hands in his, and brought them to his mouth. She shuddered when he breathed on them, her eyes fixed on his in any icy glare that promised she was about to tell him to stop. But he took another, fuller breath anyway, warming her fingers with eyes full of challenge. Calling her bluff. She gave them an experimental bend rather than spit whatever vitriol was on the tip of her tongue, tingling fingertips curling against his cheeks. He breathed again, long and hot, pointedly ignoring the way her thumbs rested on the rim of his lips, almost close enough to taste. Ignoring images of her face glowing like a piece of the moon in the blizzard, and how breakable she had looked with tears of light streaming out of her eyes.

"What do you want?" she hissed bitterly, and he furrowed his brow at her over her knuckles.

"What do you mean what do I want?"

"I mean why are you still here? Why are you helping me?" She scowled at him when he breathed again rather than answer, frustrated. Or frightened. It was hard to tell. "You should have left me in that blizzard. There must be something you hope to gain."

"You have serious trust issues," he frowned, shivering, "you know that?"

"Why shouldn't I? Everyone I've ever known either wants me dead or wants to use me as a weapon."

"Not me."

"I know," she whispered. "I don't like what I can't explain." She scrunched her hands, pulling away, and murmured, "Let me try again."

The petals came away faster once she had some feeling in her fingertips, little clumps of red flowers tumbling from the stems onto the floorboards. Link snatched two cups from the table while she worked and helped her divide the growing pile in half for steeping. By then the water was hot enough to pour. She pulled the kettle off the fire, filled the cups to the brim, and set it aside. They watched the tea steam, still shivering in their blankets.

"I'm sending you home," she murmured, "just as soon as the storm clears. The guardian will show you the way."

"That is so like you," he scoffed. "You'd rather rid yourself of the closest thing you've ever had to a friend rather than bring yourself to say thank you."

"And that's so like _you:_ assuming we're friends. Assuming I'm incapable of showing gratitude."

"Then say thank you."

"No."

He reached for his cup, chugging it before she could get halfway through her objection. It burned all the way down to his stomach. All his extremities were still cold, but at least he was warmer on the inside. She looked more than a little jealous.

She shook her head when he reached for hers. "Two more minutes."

But she was still shivering. He snaked his arms into her mound of blankets and pulled her closer, ignoring more protests, and buried his face close to hers, enveloping her back in the hopes that the tea in his stomach might radiate enough warmth that her teeth would stop chattering.

"You're ridiculously stubborn," he breathed on her ear, warming her and taunting her with the heat on his breath at once.

"It will be twice as effective if I just show a little patience."

"I don't mean the tea."

"Are you still on about not thanking you for being a reckless—"

"I mean trying to force me to leave," he said, and she turned, frowning, to meet his eyes. "Getting rid of me won't be as easy as you think."

She didn't answer, turning back to stare into the fire like she could absorb heat through her eyeballs. But what did he know? Maybe she could. Exactly two minutes later, she reached for her tea and downed it. Once her teeth stopped chattering, Link set about rearranging their nest.

"Let's get some sleep," he sighed, laying some of his quilts down like a makeshift mattress, and pulling her down when he yanked her cocoon open to spread over both of them and she snapped at him. He wrapped his arms around her as she grudgingly gave into the warmth of their combined blankets, burrowing his nose in the back of her neck. "With any luck, we'll wake up with feeling in all our toes."

There wasn't much by way of clothing separating them, every shift and shiver a consuming reminder of skin on skin. And she was softer than he had ever dared to imagine, so soft that he couldn't help but let his thumb brush absently where his hand was splayed over her stomach, couldn't help but feel. She turned her head to pass him a dirty look.

"Go to sleep," he insisted, holding her tighter, and bribed by her enviable position between his heat and the heat of the fire, she didn't argue.

They curled around each other, the little egg still nestled in the corner, and drifted off listening to the howl of the snowstorm.

Link woke the next morning from the best sleep he had ever had in his life. The sun was up, glittering blindingly on a white crystal carpet spread over the mountainside and the fresh heaping of snow on the pine branches. He wiggled his toes, counted ten in working order. Burrowed deeper in Zelda's hair and breathed.

She shifted against him, trying to roll, and he propped himself up on his elbows so she could turn onto her back. She stared up at him with those calculating green eyes, more narrow and glassy than usual, and loosed a shaky sigh.

"Go, Link," she whispered, pleaded, _begged_ , and for a moment he felt his resolve falter. "Go home."

"I told you: you can't get rid of me that easily."

"Don't you want to? Don't you have family?"

"I had an uncle," he murmured, pulling the blankets a little tighter around her shoulders. "Buried him last winter."

She closed her eyes. "You'll only get hurt if you stay."

He snorted. "Stop pretending like you know everything."

"I'm serious. You don't know how many people I've hurt. How many people I've—" she stopped, swallowing. "I can't control this, and if you won't go, you'll get hurt, too."

"Then I'll be very careful," he promised, as mockingly as he knew how. "I'm not leaving you."

He watched a single tear slip out of the corner of her eye and pool at her ear, quashing the urge to taste it.

"Idiot," she hissed.

He smirked at her, admiring that pretty crease in her brow, and leaned down to kiss the corner of her mouth. "Witch."

She sighed, rolling onto her shoulder to face the fire again, and he slipped back into position at her back, pulling the blankets up around them and letting his fingers trace a lazy trail from her shoulder down to her waist. _Don't be afraid, Zelda_ , he wanted to whisper in her ear. _I'm not._ But he knew what she would say: that his courage was a side effect of his stupidity. And maybe she was right. Maybe he was a fool.

Her fingers came up to weave with his at her hip, and he couldn't bring himself to care.


	28. Hunting Season

_Prompt No. 28  
_ _Word count: ~1180  
Universe: Breath of the Wild  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: T  
_ _Themes: Burn injuries, hunted_

**Hunting Season**

Link dragged himself further up the tree and pressed his face into the bark, trying not to move, trying not to breathe, trying not to bleed. He closed his eyes, flinching when unending green stared back from behind his lids. Eyes he was sure he didn't know. Eyes he was sure belonged to that haunting, beautiful voice that followed him everywhere.

The bokoblins cackled and snorted below, posturing at one another as they grew more frustrated, and a moblin raised its flaccid nose and scented the air.

He wasn't usually this reckless. But he hadn't had a decent meal in two days, and he had lost his way. When he came across that stash of food and treasures, he knew he had to make a choice between taking a risk or wandering the wilderness aimlessly for another two days, hoping he stumbled across an easy meal. But that sort of desperate thinking was dangerous. It was the sort of thinking that saw him rushing into a monster camp with nothing but a rusty claymore on his back.

He had actually fared rather well at first, securing a bow and some arrows from an unwary sentry on the outskirts of the encampment before it could sound the alarm. But one missed headshot meant the bokoblin his arrow had pierced had time to alert the others, and the next thing he knew a horde was bearing down on his position. He abandoned his bow for his sword, swinging the two-handed weapon in a sad mimicry of how it might have been used in another age, long before he found it in the ruins where some fallen soldier must have dropped it. He was able to hack no less than four bokoblins to pieces with it before the weakened metal buckled under the stress, leaving him with a hilt and useless bit of jagged blade.

The next thing he knew a moblin had him by the leg and threw him like a ragdoll into a bit of crumbled wall. His head throbbed and his vision swam as he scrambled to his feet, running towards the now-barren center of the camp in search of a weapon. An arrow pierced his side as he fled, sending him stumbling into the large spit erected over the fire and toppling it. Embers scattered, igniting blades of dried grass, spreading fire that gobbled up that bone dry place like a snake eating its own tail.

Licking a furious trail straight to a stack of powder kegs.

The explosion sent him flying and his skull cracked against the dirt. He laid where he landed for a long time, breathing dust and smoke, listening to the death throes of the monsters engulfed by the blast, suffering shattered bones or pierced through by deadly bits of shrapnel. His whole side was burned, from the tip of his ear to his thigh, and his head pounded. But when he finally moved to press himself up on his hands, groaning, the dust and the embers were lifting like dandelion seeds, floating, drifting upwards from between his fingers and all around him with a threatening heat.

Then the sky turned red, and he heard the voice. The voice that made his heart pound and his breath catch. The voice that tore his mind open with gentle whispers, that vibrated through all of him, exposing the places he wasn't whole until his own soul was insisting, _insisting_ , that something was missing.

 _Blood moon_ , she called it, as the omen rose higher over his head.

 _Aimless spirits return to flesh_ , she warned, whorls of black and purple smoke coalescing, weaving into fur and claws and snouts.

 _Be careful_ , she whispered. And when he didn't move, when his heart stammered uselessly in his chest, when the last bits of sinew and muscle wrapped together and the beasts drew breath, she shouted, _Run, Link, you have to run!_

He had pulled himself to his feet, groaning, panting, gasping, and fled, monster roaring in his wake.

Now they hunted him. He took a steadying breath and pulled himself onto a higher bough, looking for better cover in the canopy, and bit back a gasp as bark bit unforgivingly into his injuries. He was exhausted. He was bleeding out. The forest was swarming with monsters and the closest thing he had to a weapon were the tree branches. Soon the sun would be up, and hiding from them would be that much harder.

He bowed his forehead to the bark, trying to formulate a plan. Trying to find a way to stay alive. But even if he somehow managed to last the night, he wasn't sure where to go from there. The beacon he had placed while on the Plateau was obscured by swathes of mountains and forests, and the map on his slate was dark and uncharted. He sighed, closing his eyes. The unending green stared back.

"I can't do this," he whispered in a pitiful apology, wincing when a moblin roared just beneath him. "I can't do this alone."

He felt something, a touch, so real and sudden he started. When he opened his eyes movement—light?—flickered out of the corner of his eye, drawing his sights upward. The wind stirred, rustling the leaves, and there was a word in it.

 _Higher_.

He obeyed, as he had from the first, as though he were programmed to obey. Several feet higher the branches bent and weaved, forming an uneven framework that was just wide enough to lay on and deep enough to cradle him. He collapsed into it without a second thought, favoring his burned side, watching the bokoblins scour the forest floor for him with one eye turned toward the ground.

He curled in on himself against the chilly wind, and finally, exhausted, listless, mindless, he drifted to sleep to the sound of his enemies circling his hiding place.

In the morning all was silent. The sun filtered gently through the bit of canopy hanging over him. He stared through the web of branches at the forest floor, looking for his hunters. But they seemed to have given up. He turned gingerly to right himself, stretching against the awkward stiffness twisting knots down his spine, and out of the corner of his eye he spied a bird's nest laden with eggs. He snatched them and started his slow descent.

On the ground he managed, with great effort, to start a small fire, and heated a flat stone beside it. He split the eggs open on it, his whole body sagging with the smell of them as they crackled, and had a hot omelet for breakfast. He thought it was the best meal he had ever eaten.

He put his back against the tree that had carried him safely through the night and closed his eyes again. The green stared back, softer than before. Nearly smiling.

 _You're never alone_ , the wind whispered.

It wasn't until the eyes faded, and the wind stilled, and it was far too late to answer, that he realized it was a promise.

 _Never_.


	29. Reluctant Bedrest

_Prompt No. 29  
_ _Word count: ~2110  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 26 — Blindness"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Frustration, uselessness, hope, and fluff_

**Reluctant Bedrest**

Training to fight blind was about as satisfying as one might expect.

The early exercises were simple enough: a series of challenges meant to hone his working senses to track moving targets. Could he swing a stick at the right time and distance to intercept someone running at him? Could he hear someone sneaking up from behind him?

Could he walk through a series of obstacles without tripping over all of them?

Needless to say, he didn't feel like much of a hero. And things only got more frustrating when his opponents were finally ordered to move on from being passive targets to actively fighting back. He went to bed most nights with more fresh bruises than he knew what to do with. He enlisted Nell's help with running drills after supper some nights, when the thought of going up to his room and just lying there until the morning was too unbearable.

"Come on, Link," Nell said at the end of a particularly grueling day, reaching for his hand to help him up from where he had knocked him over. "It's almost midnight. Let's call it quits."

"No, not yet. Let's go again."

"Link. _I'm_ tired. And you look like a hinox dragged you through the mud. We can spar some more tomorrow."

 _Spar_ was an extremely generous word for what they were doing. Link wiped his brow. "Come on. Once more."

"That's _enough_ —"

" _Again!_ "

He swung his waster and Nell blocked—and then twisted his wooden blade down, stepped in, and shoved, wrenching his weapon out of his hand. Link stumbled back, disarmed and panting.

"I _can't_ , Nell, don't you get it? I can't do that to her!"

He was quiet, and this was the part Link hated the most, more than getting beat up in the arena, more than stumbling blindly when he tried to walk himself from the bed to the chamber pot: not being able to read expressions in the silence, see what someone was thinking in their face or their eyes when they wouldn't tell you.

He finally said, "You mean the princess?"

He nodded, swallowing, still breathless, and rubbed a sore spot on his forearm. "She already feels like no one expects her to awaken her powers before it's too late, and now she's stuck with _me_ —"

He flinched, picturing her face in the dark. Swallowing down a flurry of words. _Blind. Broken. Useless. Playing at being a soldier._ But self pity would get him no where, and it would certainly do nothing for her.

"If I give up," he breathed, "then she'll be doing this alone. At least, if I keep trying, maybe…"

He trailed off. He didn't really know what he meant to say. Maybe it was nonsense. Maybe it didn't make a difference. But if she kept trying despite how hopeless her fight seemed, maybe knowing he was fighting just as impossible a battle meant something. Maybe it would make her feel less alone.

"All right," Nell sighed, putting his waster back in his hands, and they squared up. "Once more."

A few seconds later Link was back in the dirt.

He laid in bed that night aching all over and staring unseeing through the ceiling. The sword hummed broodingly in its scabbard beside the bed, and he reached over to soothe it, brushing the hilt with bruised fingertips. He could feel its malcontent at not being wielded.

 _Probably feeling useless_ , he thought, smirking at the irony.

He drew the sword out of its hiding place, laying the winged hilt near his shoulder and letting the blade drape across his torso and hip. It pulsed in his hands, over his body. It took him a moment to identify the rhythm: his heartbeat.

He sat up, startled, taking the sword with him. It hummed when his feet touched the floor, generating a steady undercurrent he could feel all the way up one arm and down the other. He stood, listening, feeling. When he turned a vibration swept out of the sword, making his right side tingle. He did it again, slower, moving towards the sensation until the thrum pulsed harder, crescendoed, spiked, and—

The sword touched the wall.

It buzzed at him. _Scolded him_ for not listening.

His eyes wandered, sightless, down to the blade in his hand, and he was overcome again by that strangeness he couldn't quite explain—the oddest sensation of looking at himself.

He didn't sleep much that night, suddenly, cautiously hopeful, and nauseous, and giddy. He wandered around his room, learning the different pips and thrums and buzzes that helped him avoid the furniture. Then slid the sword into its scabbard, strapped it to his back, and tried again, listening for the subtle differences that way.

The next day, he reported for training in full armor.

"You sure you want to do this?" Nell asked, watching him adjust his gauntlets. Letting him struggle with the leathers a bit.

The hum shifted in his scabbard, thrumming a distinct tone that made him feel a little easier. It matched something in Nell's voice. He said, drawing the sword, feeling its balance, "Yeah, I'm sure."

They moved out into the arena. It was the same drill as yesterday. He couldn't see Nell as he squared his shoulders at him, couldn't see him raise his weapon or the shift of his stance as he readied a blow.

But he didn't need to see.

The sword vibrated a warning and he sidestepped, parrying against the heat that traveled up his arm like an afterimage. He felt the satisfying weight of a blade ricocheting off his shield, and then stepped in to stab, and the rush that thrilled out of the blade when it met Nell's armor and knocked him off his feet could only be described as triumphant.

"Ow," Nell said, easing himself off the flat of his back.

"Again," Link breathed, hardly able to keep from bouncing a bit on his toes. "Let's go again."

They did. They ran the drill four times before Nell got sick of getting batted out of the way and demanded they move on to something else. They ran all the drills from the week before, and a few they used to run together from before, when he still had his sight. The sword guided him with pulses and vibrations and rises and falls in the undercurrent, little bits of heat or jolts of warning shivering through his bones at just the right times. And there was something else, another hum, brighter, warmer than the others, that would go off now and again when he turned—east, was it?—but he couldn't pinpoint it among the rest.

It was still disconcerting, trading blows in the dark, and he still misread the signals occasionally. But it was something. It was _progress_.

By the end of the day, the captain had him in the arena with four men, rotating opponents regularly both to keep them refreshed and more difficult to anticipate. His performance was hardly flawless—he earned as many fresh bruises as he gave, and he was bleeding where his armor had failed him—but as he peeled his helmet off, stuck to his forehead with sweat and grime, for the first time in a long time he felt like his effort was worth something.

He deflated a little when the captain told him to take the next day off. He didn't want to give up his momentum. But he insisted, said he needed him to heal so he could increase the difficulty. He wasn't happy about it, but he knew better than to question him. The captain wasn't as much of a pushover as Nell.

But when he finally made it back to his room—a little quicker than usual, now that he had the confidence to walk in a straight line without running into something—and sat on his bed, he realized how exhausted he was.

He took off his armor bit by bit, arranging all the pieces on his bed, and then strapped the sword over his back again, listening for every guiding pulse and buzz as he draped them one at a time where they belonged on the stand. It was tedious, a much more precise and subtle operation than swinging his shield around as hard as he could, and more than once the sword buzzed at him.

"I'm trying my best," he growled, and the answering vibration said the sword did not agree.

After he had most of the pieces where they belonged on the display (he gave up on the gauntlets, just leaving them on the ground beside his boots when the sword buzzed him so hard he yelped; it had been a long day, and they were both sick of that particular exercise), he shed his shirt and collapsed on the mattress, and no sooner was he ready to drift off than he heard a knock at the door. He hefted himself up and turned over, resting the sword across his lap, and bade whoever it was to come in.

And then he knew what that bright, warm thrum on the east side of the arena had been, because it was flooding him all at once, and he couldn't help but sit up a little taller.

 _Zelda_.

"I saw you in the arena today," she breathed, shutting the door quickly behind her and _bounding_ over to him, alighting on the foot of his mattress before he could collect himself. He could feel her smile, warmer and brighter than the hum in the sword. "You were amazing. Absolutely amazing! How on earth did you manage it?"

His mind ran a mile a minute. He thought of the door she had closed, of her palpable excitement filling the room like a fragrance, of the way even the sword shivered contentedly with her so close. He thought of the hope it had given him. And he dared to hope it could lend some to her.

He folded his feet under himself and told her everything. He draped the sword over the quilts, putting her hands on the blade and the hilt and describing the hum in as precise language as he knew how, laughing with her when it proved pointless ( _"You don't feel that?" "It feels the same as always—" "That! Right there!" "No, nothing!"_ ). He told her about late nights training with Nell, and the frustration of a fruitless training regimen—and, a little sheepishly, that it was thinking of her, of how she kept fighting for her powers despite all odds, that pushed him to keep trying. That kept his mind open to the possibilities, wherever they might lie.

"I should let you sleep," she sighed at length, though she made no move to leave. "The captain says you're on bedrest."

"I know," he frowned. "I don't need bedrest. I need _practice_."

"Of course you would say that," she scoffed, her fingers suddenly brushing a line across his arm, just below where it burned. It reminded him of when she touched just below his eyes, the day he lost his sight. "You're bleeding."

It struck him then that he hadn't cleaned up after he got out of his armor and put it away, much less taken a _bath_ , and that he had been sitting there for the better part of half an hour, telling her all his deepest secrets, and didn't even have a shirt on. But if she minded sitting there with him, still filthy and covered in blood and bruises, she didn't say. The tips of his ears turned red.

"You haven't touched your supper, either."

"I will," he promised, breath hitching just a bit, suddenly desperate to get her out of there before he could do anything else to embarrass himself.

She touched his knee as she stood and crossed the room, and the sword pulse quick and hot, mimicking the sudden rush of his pulse. Mocking him. He glared at it.

"Good night, Link," she said at the door. "You really were amazing."

He stood, shoving the sword back into the scabbard the way he might shut the door on Nell if he were being stupid. Then he said over his shoulder, softly, for reasons that utterly escaped him, "Not as amazing as you're going to be."

He felt her smile on his back before she closed the door.

He puffed a flustered exhale when he was sure she had gone, slapping his hands over his eyes, and pointedly ignored the warm glow of the sword radiating up at him from where he had dropped the scabbard on the mattress.

He inhaled his dinner, and took the most scalding bath he had ever taken in his life.


	30. Wound Reveal

_Prompt No. 30  
_ _Word count: ~1700  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 29 — Reluctant Bedrest"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Sacrifice, worthlessness, confessions_

**Wound Reveal**

As amazing as the sword was, it was no substitute for sight. He missed the invaluable nuance of body language, and reading books, and seeing colors. He missed sunsets and landscapes and the gleam in Zelda's eyes when her research took an unexpected turn. But it was more than anyone else with his affliction had, so he was grateful. He could still fight, and he had a sense of the topography for about a ten foot radius, and, if it was quiet enough, he was still a surprisingly decent shot with a bow.

After months of grueling training sessions, they finally deemed him fit to escort the princess on her excavations and pilgrimages without an entourage.

It was nice to get away from the castle for a while, just the two of them. She was a different person in the wilds. She gushed over plants and frogs and lizards and minerals, pulling him this way or that off the road to inspect something that he could only pray wasn't poisonous. She'd put things in his hands so he could feel the textures—petals soft as lamb's ears or slimy algae or whatever else she thought was wonderful—and describe colors and patterns for him in exhaustive detail.

It was sweet that she wanted to involve him, even when he wasn't particularly useful. Sometimes she'd draw his attention or guide him with a touch, and in those precious, fluttering moments, being blind didn't feel like such a curse.

Their visit to the Spring of Power played out as these types of things usually did—that subtle shift from actual joy to a pretense of it, trading jokes and laughs in a threadbare effort to keep the pall looming over their heads from crashing down. They had done it a half dozen times in Faron at least. But there was something about the unfamiliarity of Akkala that made that place feel less forgiving than the dragon head in the ruins. Or perhaps it was the chilly onset of dusk, which they had entirely brought upon themselves by dallying the whole way. Neither of them had been in any kind of hurry to arrive.

"I guess I'll change," she said, dithering nearby with her prayer dress in her hands while he unpacked a few things.

"I promise not to look," he smirked, and she puffed a breath as she walked by. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sigh.

"See that you don't."

She moved up the steps towards the pool and kicked off her boots. And while it was easy not to look, it was difficult not to _hear_ ; whispers and rustles of cloth and buttons, her shiver when cold air touched bare skin. His other senses had all become more acute since losing his sight, hearing included, but she suddenly seemed crushingly close. Had she really barely stepped away? Or was it because he was trying so hard _not_ to listen that she was all he could hear? There was a merciful slide and shuffle of her settling skirt, and he knocked back a drink of water from his canteen, trying to banish the heat from his face.

She came back to drop her travel clothes in a pile at their campsite, and he escorted her to the water's edge.

"Not too long," he murmured, her fingers alighting on his as he steadied her descent into the pool. "It'll be cold tonight."

"All right," she promised, though she didn't sound happy about it. "Not long."

She slipped through the water into the shadow of the goddess statue, and he turned to take his post, planting the sword at his feet in its scabbard. But he really didn't anticipate any outside danger finding them in that secluded place. It was the dangers in the water that had him concerned, and they were exactly what he couldn't protect her from.

She prayed silently for the better part of two hours, so quiet and motionless that he would never have known she was still there if not for that bright, warm hum whispering out of the hilt. It was hard to know how long to leave her to her task; she always seemed less whole when she was through, less herself, like the prayers demanded pieces of her in sacrifice. He had never actually seen what happened in the water. For all he knew she laid herself out on an altar and cut offerings out of herself with a knife. And while he was relatively certain that wasn't actually the case, the disturbing image still pushed and prodded at him, urging him to invite her out of the water at the earliest opportunity.

Then he heard her voice. Not the urgent whispers that sometimes fell from her lips, bits of prayer or names of spirits forgotten to most of the world. Just her voice, as loud as she dared to make it, carrying over the rush of the waterfalls emptying into the spring. Just a girl, asking someone stronger for help who refused to listen.

"Please just tell me…" she finally begged, and he couldn't keep his back turned anymore. "What is it…? What's wrong with me?!"

Zelda fell silent again, either waiting for a reply or pouring herself into another prayer. Link couldn't be sure; it was impossible to get a clear impression with that much distance between them, with that much water. It was like reaching for something through a void.

He moved, tired of the blindness, tired of not knowing, and knelt at the water's edge.

"Zelda," he pleaded, extending a hand. Trusting that she would take pity on him and take it.

It was an uncomfortably long wait. With the waterfalls disturbing the surface, he could hardly tell if she was moving towards him at all. But then, soft as breath, her fingers alighted on his and she let him lift her out of the water. He led her wordlessly down the steps to their little camp, handing her a blanket and a change of clothes, and knelt to spark the flint while she moved away to strip off her dress. When she came back she dropped her prayer shift in a sodden heap, and then her bracelets and her necklace one at a time, each metallic _clink_ as they collided much too sharp in that quiet place. She sat down, tucking her knees to her chest, and put her head down, spent.

He had never felt her looking this small. He wondered how much of herself she had left on that altar this time.

All at once, sitting beside her in front of the fire, surrounded by that deafening silence and her face pressed into her arms, he would have given anything to have his eyes back.

She shifted gently, just a whisper of hair and cloth, as he started on their supper. Turning her head towards him on her arms.

"I think…" she whispered, her voice trembling, and he turned his ear toward her to listen. "Maybe I'm not worthy of it. Maybe there's something _missing_ about me, some integral piece I was born without and can never have. Maybe that's why I don't feel anything—"

"Zelda," he sighed, just a quiet, tossing butter into the pot. "Stop. Please. That isn't it."

"But it _might_ be, don't you see?"

She still spoke like she was telling him a secret. Her darkest secret. And he realized she was. It was her worst fear, the one she kept locked away and dared admit to no one but herself. And she was telling it to him.

It was like staring into an open wound.

"Hylia could have judged me unworthy long ago, and there might be nothing for it. Maybe that's… maybe that's why she doesn't answer."

"No," he murmured, voice muffled as he covered his face to rub at his eyes. "No, no. That can't be it."

"Of course it can—"

"No, it _can't_ , because you're perfect, Zelda," he growled, turning to face her, just so he could stare at the nothing where she was. "You're beautiful, and smart, and braver than anyone I've ever met. You're kind, and curious, and devout to a fault. You _inspire_ me, and you can't convince me that the gods are withholding your powers from you because Hylia decided you weren't _good enough_."

The butter was browning. He meant to make a roux and turn it into soup. But suddenly he didn't have the patience for something so practical. He grabbed his paring knife and cored a few apples, tossing them in whole and in slices, coating them over the heat until the whole spring was bathed in the sweet fragrance of it.

"Everyone thinks I learned to see through the sword by sheer force of will or by some grace of the gods. But they're wrong. The gods had nothing to do with it. I thought of you. I thought of you, and nothing else."

He spooned a hot buttered apple into a bowl and held it out to her. She didn't take it. She didn't move. She didn't _breathe_. And he suddenly heard his own tirade, bubbling up in his memory like the butter boiling in the pot. He swallowed, ears reddening and the dish still hovering in the air. The sword pulsed hot and quick beside him.

He set the bowl on the ground, and turned to pull the cookpot off the fire, desperate for distraction. He sloshed hot buttered apple over the sacred stonework when he moved it too fast, lacing sticky sugar over an ancient path that the had been preserved from a bygone era by divine providence. Undoing tens of thousands of years of piety with ten seconds of sacrilege.

He was much too flustered to care.

She finally said, her voice incomparably sweeter than the aroma of the apples, "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

He bobbed a curt, distracted nod. He didn't trust himself to open his mouth again.

But then her fingers found his jaw, drawing him gently aside to stare into sightless eyes.

She kissed him, and he would have sworn to all the gods that he saw lights again.


	31. Experiment

_Prompt No. 31  
_ _Word count: ~1330  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 30 — Wound Reveal"  
_ _Pairings: Zelink  
_ _Rating: K  
_ _Themes: Fate, blindness, amnesia_

**Experiment**

Zelda's powers came to her softly on a warm autumn day.

Link didn't even notice when it happened. She was always warm and bright. It didn't strike him as odd in the slightest that she felt a little warmer, a little brighter. And of course the sword didn't react. It had been expecting it from the first.

She had been nestled in his arms, reclining with him against the lonely tree that overlooked Lake Hylia, and he had been terribly close to drifting off, his face turned into her hair and drawing deeper and deeper into peace with every breath. When she wriggled her hand out from between them and then sat up with a gasp, all he could think at first was that she was disturbing an incredibly nice catnap.

But then she'd thrown her arms around his neck and burst into tears. He'd held her, soothed her, until she finally managed to tell him why. The sword thrummed something soft and contented where he had left it beside his shield, a gentle warmth in the undercurrent. It felt like coming home.

"I was thinking of you," she wept, half overcome, half giddy. "I was thinking of you, and nothing else."

Gods, but he wished he could have seen her.

What a sight the pair of them must have been. A blind swordsman and a princess that glowed like the sun. The people said they were like something out of legend.

They couldn't have known how wrong they were.

They couldn't have known that fate was woven with cruel and clever threads. That the same love that dredged up her powers would move her to choose him over victory when the gods forced her to make a choice. That the Calamity would slip through her fingers while he lay bleeding out in her arms.

He begged her to leave him. He begged her to let him go. But she just couldn't bring herself to do it.

Maybe, if he hadn't been blind, things would have been different.

Maybe, if she had hated him instead of loving him…

Maybe then…

_…_

_Link…_

_Wake up, Link…_

Something warm stirs in his chest, like light, or a memory. He opens his eyes, and it's dark.

He shivers. His body is cold and wet. He glides his hands along the slick walls rising up on either side of him. He's in something shallow—a vat? a tub?—but the water has drained, leaving him dripping and his fingertips insensitive. They crest the top and he grips the grainy edge, pulling himself upright, and scans the room. But there's nothing. Just darkness, deeper and deeper darkness, no matter where he looks.

"Hello?" he calls, and his voice is rough and hoarse with disuse. He doesn't even recognize it as his own. But someone had called to him. A voice. He tries again, louder. "Is someone there?"

There's no answer. He reaches beyond the rim, getting to his knees, stretching until his fingers brush the floor. There's something there. Something slightly warm. Something slightly bright. Which feels an odd impression, given that he can't see a thing. But that's the only way he can think to describe it.

He climbs out of the vat, holding tight to the rim as he turns and lowers his feet to the ground, just in case he's misjudged the distance, or the depth. Just in the case the floor is actually a ledge and he's about to be suspended on nothing. His foot touches the ground, and he goes down to his knee, pressing his face against the tub and swallowing.

His fingers brush that slightly warm, slightly bright thing again. Long, angular, raised in places with something cool and smooth, like metal or glass. His fingers travel down to one tapered end, and then move to the other and feather against a wide, winged hilt. It hums gently, and he shudders. So gently, it seems almost deliberately so.

 _That is the Master Sword,_ says the voice from before, and his head snaps up, trying to pinpoint the source. _Take it. It will help guide you after your long slumber._

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. It's in his chest, in his heart, in his mind. It's the _only_ thing in him, he realizes, and it feels like it's tearing him apart. Like his body knows it's just a piece of a larger whole, and is ready to rip itself to shreds looking for the rest. He wants to shout, demand, beg. But he just grips the scabbard instead, holding it close to his chest like it's all he has. Because it is.

The hum from the sword swells, just a little, running past his fingertips to his wrists, up his arms, through his chest. It's slow and gradual as a trickle of water. But soon it's in all of him, coursing through his body like lifeblood. He slips the scabbard blindly over his back, fumbling with the buckle in front. If it wasn't so _dark_ —

He finally finds a notch with the pad of his thumb and weaves the prong through it. He's trembling, and while he's sure it's only partly from the chill, it's easier to blame the draft than admit to the terror writhing in his chest. He turns slowly, taking one unsteady step, and then another, moving towards the slight breeze, hoping to find an exit. Hoping to find the voice.

He touches a wall, or a mouth, or a doorway, but it's still pitch black. He keeps going until he reaches a landing, sitting at the top of the stairway and sliding his way down, one step at a time, because there's no telling how far he'll fall if he stumbles.

When the ground levels he walks until he reaches a wall, and then walls on either side of him. A dead end. The hum ebbing out of the sword got inexplicably stronger before he touched it, like a sensor, or a warning. He reaches again, feeling for a rim, reasoning that stairs are built, and wouldn't have intentionally led nowhere; when he stands on the tips of his toes he feels the ledge, and heaves himself up.

There are more stairs, and the air is getting warmer as he climbs, and he holds out hope that he might be nearing the end of that place. That there's a way out of the darkness.

At the top, he smells grass, and feels a warm breeze, and the unmistakable, perfect heat of the sun beating down on his face. And he trembles again, his stomach dropping, and goes to his knees, breathless. Because it wasn't the chamber he struggled through that was lightless. It was him.

He's blind.

He buries his face in his hands as something choked claws its way out of his throat. The sword on his back hums again, vibrates a soft reassurance.

_"Master…"_

He blinks uselessly, just listens. It isn't the first voice, isn't the one that's still gnawing at his body and his mind like something buried, something feral and trapped trying to claw its way out. It's a lilt, almost a song. It's almost what the hum thrumming through his body would have sounded like if it could be heard.

_"Have courage, Master. You must have courage."_

He doesn't know why that sounds so familiar.

He knows the sword is right. He feels stricken, too petrified at his condition and his prospects even to move. But he has to move. He needs food, water, shelter. Answers, most of all. He needs a name, and a direction, and a scrap of hope. But he barely knows how to begin.

What he wouldn't have given for a drop of light in that endless darkness.

But then the voice answers him, insists he is all the light he needs, and he's powerless to deny her.

_You are the light—our light—that must shine upon Hyrule once again._

_Now go._


	32. Outbreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A finale piece for the incomparable [@intangiblyyourswrites](http://intangiblyyourswrites.tumblr.com/), who has been having a lousy couple of days. I hope this makes you smile!

_Prompt No. 32  
Word count: ~1730  
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 21 — Infection"  
Pairings: Zelink  
Rating: T  
Themes: Voyeurism, nonconsensual kissing, unhealthy relationships_

**Outbreak**

Zelda cried herself to sleep in his arms that night, the way she clung to his shirt the only thing keeping him from tearing off to another part of the castle to do something unspeakable. Just before she drifted off, sniffling, she forbade him from doing any irreparable damage, but his only take away was that breaking a few bones wasn’t completely out of the question.

This had gone on long enough. It was time he made his claim on her known. He had been _more_ than patient, and it would deter anymore of these ridiculous suitors, not to mention dispel any lingering ideas her father had that she was still available to use as a bargaining chip in his self-serving political negotiations. She wouldn’t like it, of course, but he was done waiting for her to accept their fate on her own.

She needed a push. Preferably a very public one.

He could think of one brazen scenario that was sure to get attention.

When she woke he was gone—or at least as “gone” as he ever seemed to be. The truth was he hadn’t left her side since he bound himself to her behind the old temple. He had been drifting for so long, untethered and tameless, that he had nothing of himself anymore except his own name. He still didn’t fully understand how or why she had seen him that night, only that it was impossible for him to be apart from her now.

It was intoxicating the way she grounded him, the way she made him feel again for the first time in centuries.

She startled when she realized she was alone, scanning the room for signs he was still nearby. Little did she know how close he really was, how many times her eyes passed through him. She hugged her shoulders, _feeling_ his nearness, even if she was not aware of it. Soon, very soon, their bond would be strong enough for him to manifest more permanently. But for now he needed to save his energy.

It wouldn’t do for him to vanish part way through their display.

Not that she made staying away easy. She spent most of the day in her room, no doubt still shaken from the encounter the night before, sitting listlessly at her writing desk or by the window, spattered in sunlight. She was infinitely lovely, every forlorn breath or weary roll of her head tempting his touch, and all the more as she called for a hot bath in the afternoon, not quite able to banish the chill of spending the night in his arms. He stood shamelessly at the threshold as she peeled away her dress, watching her bare herself as she had done for no one else. But she was already his by right, and would be his in more ways shortly. She sank into the water, unguarded, and he loomed at her shoulder, watching the steam bead at her hairline and run down her neck. No need to rush things.

By sunset she began to feel his absence—miss him? But she would never admit to that—checking shadows for a flicker of lantern light and peering regularly over her shoulder for him. He was loath to make her wait. He nearly _didn’t_ , drawn to the promise of her like a moth, moon-dusted, papery, _flammable_ , fluttering drunkenly towards flame. But there were other matters to attend to first.

Castles had pulses, same as people, and forests, and rivers. He could feel the movement in the walls, knew where the scullery maids were and the guards and the mighty King of Hyrule himself, not that he usually troubled himself with those trivial details. But tonight was a special occasion. The king and high prince were meeting together—no doubt planning an embarrassing, public announcement at dinnertime.

All the better. It would make humiliating them that much more gratifying.

The guard outside Zelda’s chamber was a decent soldier, but weak-minded and easily influenced. He knocked at her door without resistance, delivering a fake summons to the king’s study.

Link could hear her heart hammering as she answered it. Her fingers worried and pulled at each other, nails hooking and clicking as she meandered down the castle corridors. As though there were anything to fear. As though he would ever allow anyone else near her ever again. She came to the study door and took a breath, steeling herself. Chancing one last, fruitless glance over her shoulder. Then she crossed the threshold.

The study was empty.

He slammed the door shut behind them, all the candles sparking green as he imposed himself on the room like a shadow. She spun, frightened and furious. Just the way he liked her.

 _“Link,”_ she hissed as he melted into sight, as he prowled closer. “Have you lost your mind? What if someone sees you?”

“I’m counting on it,” he growled, taking her wrist—lifting it to his mouth, running his teeth over it. “This nonsense with the high prince has to end. You belong to me, and I intend to make that painfully obvious to him; to your father; to you,” he added, twisting, just so, to cause a gentle twinge of pain up her arm.

She took a helpless step back and he followed, closing in until the desk behind her gave satisfying rattle. She panted, breathless, startled, desperate—and she was too enticing to resist. His mouth was on hers in the moment next, drinking her pitiful protests like wine. He threaded his fist in her hair, bending her into submission, working her until she turned pliant, until her fists pressed into his tunic were a mere formality, until she was flushed and gasping for him. When she was dizzy he craned her farther, lavishing a trail down her neck until he found her pulse, rabbit-quick, and sealed his lips there. He set his lantern on the desk, his free hand roving her back, her waist, her hips, claiming every inch.

He could sense them in the hall. Not long now.

 _“Please—”_ she whispered, but she didn’t get as far as saying _stop_. It was electrifying. He sucked a little harder, savoring the way she writhed against him. Savoring how near she was to giving in.

The door opened. The king and high prince stepped through, eyes going wide as they registered the scene before them. They couldn’t see him, not the way she could; he must’ve seemed little more than a shell, a ghostly vision of tattered cloth and wind. But he should think what he was doing to her was obvious.

Demetri drew his sword, outraged, ready to charge toward them in a fury. But he wasn’t the one he was interest in. Not really. He wreathed him in green flame, sending him hurtling back the way he came with a yelp and into the wall across the hallway, and then sealed the door shut behind him. The king was half way through a bellow when Link silenced him—a simple weave momentarily stilling his body, quieting his mind. He went to his knees, his expression void. This king who would kneel to no one.

“He can hear you,” he murmured into her throat, sealing his lips at her jaw, beside her ear. “Tell him the truth. Tell him that you’re mine.”

Zelda shook in his arms, fat tears welling in her eyes and spilling over. “I’m so sorry,” she tried to say, but he shushed her soothingly, like he was soothing a child riddled with nightmares. The high prince and the guards banged at the door, but there were few forces on earth that could make it give.

“Tell him you belong to another, and I’ll let him go,” he urged her again, lacing his words with suggestion and thrilling at how easily she obeyed.

“I belong to another,” she said, the tears coming faster, her voice hitching with shame as she watched her father all but turned to stone, and he nipped at her neck in delight, the words infusing him with strength like the threads of an incantation.

“Tell him you belong to me, and you’ll be no one else’s.”

Her body sagged, her eyes went vacant. Relinquishing the last of her pride, and choosing submission. Choosing to be numb rather than to resist. “I belong to him, and I’ll be no one else’s.”

He could feel corporeality seeping into him like a drug, heady, driving him towards power. He let her go to prowl closer to the king, and she caught herself on the desk, panting. The banging went on, wood and magic clashing with metal and stone. He towered over him, and the king met his eyes lifelessly, bound to his influence.

“Now, Your Highness,” he smirked wolfishly, “you and I have our own negotiations to attend to.”

But then he felt a tug, like a single, fraying thread pulling apart a garment.

The lantern.

He turned in time to see Zelda hold it over her head, had just a moment to shout her name in fury and in terror, and then she threw it to the floor with a cry, the glass shattering open and his soul spilling out over the carpet.

He screamed. His form splintered, turned to mist, and then turned to flame. It was like being burned alive, and then flayed, and then burned again. Reduced to ashes and then dredged up out of them by the spine. He floated in the stillness, in the tiny wreath of fire, throbbing like a livewire. He was vaguely aware of Zelda pouring out the contents of her father’s decanter, and then of his soul being ushered into it. The crystal stopper kept him contained. He rolled on himself and bobbed and burned. A poe’s soul trapped in a bottle.

But he could still feel her, and he could feel the ember of a new lantern birthing deep in him.

He would rise again.

His influence over the king shattered, leaving him panting on the floor.

“Thank you, my daughter,” he breathed. “You saved us both from that monster. Now, listen to me—”

“No, Father,” she murmured, her eyes alight with a glow that was neither the green of a poe’s flame nor the holy light of the goddess’s power, stepping forward to tower over him with a captured poe clutched to her chest. “Now _you_ will listen to _me_.”


End file.
